[freehaven-dev] carnivore concerns

[Roger Dingledine <arma@mit.edu>]

Allow me to wax paranoid for a moment.

1) Carnivore is installed in a number of major ISPs.
2) Mix network nodes are often on ISPs
3) Traffic analysis is poorly understood outside the NSA
4) Traffic analysis is rumored to be better understood inside the NSA
5) We glimpsed at the conference that often a couple of compromised
   nodes are sufficient to trace source/destination of remailer mail.
6) Carnivore precisely link-level compromises mix nodes. It does nothing
   more, nothing less.
7) The FBI may well be interested in being able to follow mix traffic.

I think this provides a strong argument for more paranoid mix
configurations, given the notion that perhaps half the mix nodes out
there are link-level compromised.

--Roger