Oh my GOD! holy F! deep breathing right now! Thank you for helping me out. Yeah, he might be a little, big nerd but he is pretty wonderful...but it's kinda soon..lol OMG — MBC24 secs ago
@RоryMcCune The idea seems reasonable. Just something that would be really hard to execute well. I can't imagine they can keep a reasonably complete, or reasonably accurate list of bounty programs.
@HenryWHHack most ToR exit nodes are run by people wanting to sniff the traffic (this is an unsupported opinion), so no I wouldn't use Tor unless you have to
@TildalWave There is an on-topic question in there, but it is a bit hidden. The question is: "what is the methodology for finding a preimage on a hash function ?"
@Adi He has a point, though: Tor is easily defeated with correlations between entry nodes and exit nodes (temporal + size). On the other hand, you also have a point: who would bother tracing you ?
Extended tracing abilities work better when potential targets don't believe they exist.
This is a known dilemma. During WWII, Allies had to let Germans sink some boat convoys to avoid letting them realize that they could decrypt the Enigma.
Similarly, small fray like @Adi will escape the Long Arm of the (almost-)Law because his spectacular demise is not worth the cost of admitting data analysis capabilities.
Also, they probably don't have a bureaucratic procedure for that.
It's ridiculous to think so incredibly easy to de-anonymize someone chaining multiple VPNs, multiple proxies, and Tor. Not just merely possible, but so incredibly easy.
@Adi I'm not saying the NSA is all-powerful, but the amount of data they have, and what they can do with it, is just mouth-watering to me. There's no tinfoil hattery here... I'm in awe of the data, and would love to analyze it.
But you shouldn't think you're secure when you aren't
They need to make US taxpayers believe that they can spy on everybody, because they have a 10 billion dollars budget to justify. They need to make "bad guys" believe that they cannot, so that they keep on using the said network.
@ThomasPornin Well, at least you'd go to bed with a huge boner offloaded from your hugely inflated ego after you read how much people on the internet overestimate your powers.
@Adi Oh, rest assured that I don't need Internet people to inflate my ego. I can do that pretty well myself.
The bottom line is that while I don't think that the NSA is all powerful (notably because it is a government organization and I don't believe in efficient government organizations), my point is that it does not make an actual difference.
Whether the NSA can or cannot trace every chain of VPN won't change their observable behaviour -- but for distinct reasons.
It still is amusing to imagine a complicated plot where some NSA people prepare a complete trail of fake documents to be "revealed" by Snowden (and it can have extra twists, depending on whether Snowden is aware of the tricks).
With a proper script, that story can easily last for two or three seasons.
@ThomasPornin Yeah, I worked on a system that was just about 4 terabytes of data. It was really fun to make correlations, statistics, random charts, etc
