[tor-talk] Please Remove Tor bridge and... from Censorship countries.

Seth David Schoen schoen at eff.org
Sun Nov 6 20:38:12 UTC 2016


Jason Long writes:

> You said the governments can see a user bandwidth usage and it is so bad because they can understand a user use Tor for regular web surfing or use it for upload files and...  
> You said governments can see users usages but not contents but how they can find specific users if Tor hide my IP?!!!!!!

Tor hides your IP address from the sites you're communicating with,
but not from your own ISP (for example), or from the Tor bridge or guard
node that you use.

In the original design of Tor there was absolutely no attempt to hide
who is using Tor, only what they are doing with it.  One idea was that
lots of people should use Tor for lots of things, so that it will be
hard to guess why a particular person uses Tor.

In the case of bridges for anticensorship, there is also some attempt
to hide who is using Tor (especially because of the idea that using
Tor can be forbidden or blocked in certain countries).  If a particular
bridge technology is unblocked, maybe the government doesn't know how
to detect it yet, so maybe they don't know who the Tor users who use
that technology are.  If a government is running the bridge, it will
know where the users are who are using that particular bridge.

-- 
Seth Schoen  <schoen at eff.org>
Senior Staff Technologist                       https://www.eff.org/
Electronic Frontier Foundation                  https://www.eff.org/join
815 Eddy Street, San Francisco, CA  94109       +1 415 436 9333 x107


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