[tor-talk] Historically speaking, what was the U.S. navy /military

[Paul Syverson]

On Thu, Jul 30, 2015 at 03:36:52AM +0800, Virgil Griffith wrote:
> > old at that point.)  We had a picture where the ordering
> > information went over the Web from the Pentagon to Domino's and was
> > routed by an enemy (Iraq at the time of the putative pizza channel
> > concern). I remember a point I would make during presentations was
> > that the enemy could see the number of orders made by people at the
> 
> That's a nice anecdote.  Thanks :)
> 
> 
> Also...
> 
> On Wed, Jul 29, 2015 at 9:55 PM, Alexandre Guillioud
> <guillioud.alexandre at gmail.com> wrote:
> > I had heard that the original use case were to protect their (US navy)
> > ships against command center localisation through RF harvesting. The onion
> > routing of the admiral commands through a few boats means enemmies can't
> > detect which on is giving orders.
> 
> Paul: I had heard this story as well.  Can you confirm/refute it?

I can confirm that this is the first I've ever heard that. I can also
confirm that I talked long ago (maybe late nineties or early aughts,
in any case after the first public onion routing deployments) to
someone who knows way more than I do about how communication on and
off ships at sea happens (or at least did at the time). This wasn't a
Navy or government person, just an academic researcher I know who said
he knew about this environment. I had an idea roughly the same as
described in this scenario and asked if this could be another useful
application of onion routing.  He said that the very tight constraints
of this environment made it almost certain that the multiple hops
needed would be unacceptable. I didn't pursue any further.

aloha,
Paul