[tor-talk] Illegal Activity As A Metric of Tor Security and Anonymity

[tor at t-3.net]

This is wrong in so many ways.

Edward Snowden's info, hand-in-hand with Prism's details, shows how 
NSA/GCHQ hates Tor because they can't break it very well. They have to 
exploit browser flaws and/or go around Tor to get what they want. If 
they owned Tor from the network perspective there would be no need for 
that, and certainly no "Tor Stinks" presentation would have been made. 
Instead of "Tor Stinks" we would have in our hands (again, courtesy of 
Edward Snowden) the details of the breakage of Tor by the spooks.

I have a hard time believing that you've been effectively tracking so 
much 'child porn, rape, snuff videos' content that you can 
conclusively say that all such content has suddenly disappeared from 
Tor. My knowledge about the way that kind of content works is, that no 
one person would be able to access much of it unless they were a 
creator/trader of the stuff. Such a person would be trying to be 
low-key about it out of fear for themselves, not posting in this list 
and seeming to admit to having been tracking that content. So - - not 
a match, for whatever reason.

The development of some of the posts in this thread seems to encourage 
list members to demonstrate/quantify what amounts of 'illegal' traffic 
may be flowing through the Tor network. I could see some interesting 
purposes for that information, none of them beneficial to Tor or its 
users.

And, the conclusion below about "Tor and its developers" is imo 
retarded. That conclusion ignores good information while relying upon 
so much which seems bogus.



 On 06/30/2014 03:19 PM, Mark McCarron wrote:

 > Well, let's put this another way.  On a planet, approaching almost 
7 billion people, a network exists (Tor) that once had a substantial 
illegal content available (i.e. child porn, rape and snuff videos, 
etc.).  Then governments, such as the UK government, announce GCHQ was 
to assist in cleaning up the dark web.
 >
 > Within a matter of months, not a single site can be found anywhere 
on the planet on the Tor network.
 >
 > Then we also have Snowden, who informs of us PRISM.  An espionage 
program designed to provide a global view that was developed in 
parallel to Tor and it just so happens that this is Tor's Achilles 
heel.
 >
 > Whether or not you accept the first part of the analysis is 
irrelevant, what really matters is the latter part and that Tor 
appears to be designed to integrate into the US espionage apparatus, 
rather than protect people from it.  Even when this is pointed out, no 
one makes any moves to correct the situation.
 >
 > That pretty much tells everyone what they needed to know about Tor 
and its developers.
 >
 > Regards,
 >
 > Mark McCarron