[tor-talk] Bridge Communities?

Sat Apr 13 03:27:52 UTC 2013

Cool story bro.

We're worried about these things too, I guess.

I mean, if killing us all is really the best way to stop Tor, then I
would submit to you that Tor is unstoppable. After all, network
engineers are basically throwaway commodities to the mexican mafia:
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2012/11/zeta-radio/

I mean, if they kill their *own* codeslaves^Wemployees, what exactly do
you think murdering us will accomplish?

In the meantime, we have nothing to fear except fear itself. Oh, and
0day. Don't forget to ph34r the 0day. Turns out that shit costs way less
than high-profile assassination contracts (fortunately or unfortunately,
depending on your perspective :/).

P.S. If you're annoyed by this flippant response, it was given because
your rant is basically a long series of FAQs. There are ways to fix your
concerns but they require development effort, and in fact many of them
(including custom pluggable transports and private bridge distribution)
are already supported. For the others: Patches welcome.

P.P.S. I'll leave the point-by-point discussion to the other NSA thread
participants ;)

Thus spake Alex M (Coyo) (coyo at darkdna.net):

> 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.
> _______________________________________________
> tor-talk mailing list
> tor-talk at lists.torproject.org
> https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-talk

-- 
Mike Perry
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