[tor-talk] Bridge Communities?

[Alex M (Coyo)]

Is Tor ever going to include support for isolated, independent bridge 
relay communities that can host their own bridge directory authorities 
without relying on the centralized tor directory hosted by Peter 
Palfrader, Jacob Appelbaum and associates?

 From lurking here on the mailing lists and other places, Jacob and 
other core Tor staff and advocates generally seem to have a worryingly 
optimistic attitude toward the possibility of coordinated Tor 
censorship, crackdowns, network manipulation and attack, coordinated 
government raids upon Tor directory servers, or even assassinations 
against Jacob Appelbaum and other core staff and volunteers involved in 
the Tor project.

Is it really so difficult to conceive of situations that involve violent 
raids against the datacenters hosting Tor directory servers and their 
mirrors, attacks, possibly physically violent, involving full military 
force against Jacob Appelbaum and other critical developers, staff, 
volunteers and advocates?

You really think the governments of the industralized "first world" 
countries won't stoop that low?

One day, they will accuse Jacob and the other core developers of being 
domestic terrorists or whatever as an excuse to fire upon native 
citizens on domestic soil.

They will do it, one day.

This is why providing relatively trivial means to deploy one's own 
bridge communities with many pluggable transports in order to prepare 
for that inevitability.

The Bitcoin core developers and advocates will also be assassinated or 
eliminated militarily as well. It is inevitable.

You really think our governments won't stoop that low? They are little 
more than pan-handling bums attempting to justify their jobs at the 
taxpayer's expense, and feel entitled to our money.

Not only that, but they have the sheer unabashed chutzpa to presume they 
are legitimate in their entitlement, and have full authority to use our 
own taxpayer money against us, to enforce unjust laws, to inflict 
injustice against their own citizenry.

If they have absolutely no compunction about shoving CISPA or SOPA down 
our throats, feel no remorse for warrantless wiretapping and unlawful 
deep packet inspection, or forcing internet service providers into 
spying on their own paying customers, what makes you think they won't 
slay Jacob Appelbaum where he stands?

They will. They will, mark my words.

And when that happens, we must be ready. Jacob's legacy needs to live 
on. Christian Fromme, Roger Dingledine, Nick Mathewson, Andrea Shepard, 
Dr. Paul Syverson..., their legacy must live on, regardless of whether 
the government shoves them against a cinderblock wall and shoots them 
dead where they stand.

We must prepare for this inevitability. We need more pluggable 
transports, we need to break up the Tor relay network into distinct 
domains, we must make the tor relay network far more resilient to 
coordinated attacks, we need to decentralize the directory authorities 
and mitigate the horrifying damage in the event of directory authority 
compromise, and the subjugation and subversion of directory authorities, 
hidden services, user privacy and the physical safety of relay operators.

We need far more stringent entry and exit guard node policies, more 
flexible and informative relay server statistics and circuit routing 
control.

We need bridge relay communities with independent bridge directory 
authorities that can be run by semi-isolated communities, including 
bridge communities within other overlay networks such as private 
OpenVPN, CJDNS or AnoNet networks. As it is, if the Tor client cannot 
connect to the centralized high-value targets controlled by the Tor 
project team, Tor is absolutely worthless and useless.

This must change. Tor should be usable by independent relay communities, 
specifically bridge relay communities with 100% use of obfuscation 
protocols or even clandestine communications methods.

For those who forgot, 'clandestine' means no one can even determine any 
communication is occurring, while 'covert' means that enemies can 
determine that communications are occurring, but not the content, and 
not necessarily the specifics as to who is communicating with whom.

Some people term it 'covert communication' where heavy use of 
steganography and obfuscation is used to hide traffic from detection and 
interception, but goes further than that, and makes traffic itself 
plausibly deniable, not just the content of or parties to a particular 
instance of communication.

Tor needs to evolve very rapidly and become impossible to detect, 
manipulate, intercept or interfere with, or it is going to very rapidly 
become irrelevant and useless.

Don't say I didn't warn you.