[tor-talk] Silk Road taken down by FBI

[mirimir]

On 10/05/2013 12:08 PM, Lunar wrote:

> BM-2cWto4coLsoD6LrFmFcUeBAua7UU2gvTSR at bitmessage.ch:
>> Not necessarily, as long VPN provider doesn't keep logs of your
>> traffic. Like for instance, Phantom Peer works wonderfully since you
>> can use bitcoin for their service.
> 
> Sorry, but no.
> 
> It is easy to order a wiretap on the VPN uplinks (without even the
> VPN operators knowing it) and to match packets going in and out.

Nobody is plausibly claiming that VPN services are as anonymous as Tor
is. However, it's just as easy to tap uplinks for Tor routers. But of
course, there are (probably) many more Tor routers than VPN services.
And Tor routers are distributed among several spheres of influence, some
of which don't cooperate readily.

Still, if one uses nested VPN tunnels from multiple providers in
suitably chosen spheres of influence, it will be nontrivial for
adversaries to install enough taps. Going through China, for example,
would be a serious roadblock for US-aligned TLAs. Even with four nested
VPN tunnels, latency and bandwidth are far better than using Tor.

Finally, it's not either/or. It's easy to include Tor in nested VPN
configurations. Latency is typically over two seconds, but bandwidth is
adequate, especially for UDP traffic.