following on from today's discussion

[Ryan Anderson]

The assumption made, that makes Tor appealing, is that your content is
being monitored anyway!

As mentioned, End-to-end encryption of the content itself is still
important on Tor. Tor is useful for maintaining anonymity not
necessarily data security, which wasn't the purpose of onion routing.

If your only choice for data security (say, you're logging onto Aim) is
Tor, then you clearly need to use common sense and decide which is the
more secure route. Tor or a direct path. If your data is unencrypted,
it's going to pass through somewhere that isn't the destination,
regardless of Tor. If your path is more trustworthy than Tor, then by
all means use it... but again, data security isn't something you should
turn to Tor for.

--
Ryan


Robert Hogan wrote:
> On Sunday 20 August 2006 23:19, Chris Palmer wrote:
>> Jay Goodman Tamboli writes:
>>> Is it true that your traffic is more likely to be eavesdropped upon?
>> We can only speculate.  End-to-end encryption...
>>
> 
> It's not a matter of speculation. Using Tor expands the number of potential 
> eavesdroppers by at least the number of exit nodes in the Tor network. 
> 
>>> I am not a lawyer, but is anyone here sure that there are legal
>>> protections against network administrators listening that would not
>>> apply to Tor node operators?
>> Kevin Bankston, a lawyer at the EFF who specializes in surveillance and
>> privacy law, is very certain that it is illegal for Tor operators to
>> surveil Tor traffic in many or most circumstances.  You can hit him up
>> for more info (I think his contact info is still in the Tor Legal FAQ),
>> or you can play it safe by using end-to-end encryption and not
>> surveilling Tor traffic going through your Tor server.  :)
> 
> I don't think the law is much consolation for someone who wants to remain 
> anonymous!
> 


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