Orionjur Tor-admin writes: > I think so too. > But I have an asking - were there any court proceedings (successful or > not) against tor-users based on their deanonimisation in the USA? > Because I never hear or read about it I very want to know it. > If there were no such proceedings it seems to me that we must > acknowledge that efficiency of the Tor has very high level.
I think there are a number of techniques that law enforcement and intelligence agencies have that don't get introduced in court at a particular time because the agencies don't want people to know about their capabilities, even at a potential cost of not being able to get particular convictions. One analogy to this is the unsubstantied claim that the British intentionally avoided making an effective air defense of Coventry during World War 2 in order to avoid compromising the Ultra program (the ability to read Enigma traffic). https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Bombing_of_Coventry#Coventry_and_Ultra (I wish I had an analogy that was actually based on something we know really happened...) I think two contemporary examples could be the ability to decrypt GSM traffic over the air, as described by many researchers, and the ability to obtain false certificates from CAs in the global PKI, as suggested in Soghoian and Stamm's paper. http://events.ccc.de/congress/2009/Fahrplan/attachments/1519_26C3.Karsten.Nohl.GSM.pdf http://petsymposium.org/2010/papers/hotpets10-Soghoian.pdf I don't mean to say that any particular agency has these capabilities, just that it seems plausible that some do. People who can do these things might not want to mention it in court because that might have the effect of changing a lot of people's behavior. One that's actually more alarming to me (because I don't know how to defend against it) is backdoors in hardware, like those described in http://www.usenix.org/event/leet08/tech/full_papers/king/king.pdf I don't think someone who had incorporated a backdoor like that in some popular device would want to mention it in any public context. -- Seth Schoen Senior Staff Technologist sch...@eff.org Electronic Frontier Foundation https://www.eff.org/ 454 Shotwell Street, San Francisco, CA 94110 +1 415 436 9333 x107 *********************************************************************** To unsubscribe, send an e-mail to majord...@torproject.org with unsubscribe or-talk in the body. http://archives.seul.org/or/talk/