Re: [tor-talk] access sites

[Maxim Kammerer <mk@xxxxxx>]

On Thu, Apr 5, 2012 at 15:41, Paul Syverson <syverson@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> As Roger and others have
> pointed out earlier in this thread, people who rely on Tor to protect
> sensitive communications are rarely going to be happy to have anything
> revealed about their usage. You are simply not going to hear from
> (most of) those people, and you are definitely not going to get a
> representative sample of such use.

True, but I was referring to a specific list of uses on the project
page, which in my opinion should have some backing, not mere
possibility of use (and does not list uses for which there is
overwhelming backing, which I think is dishonest). For instance, I can
easily imagine military intelligence using an *alternative* Tor
network, composed of frequently changing nodes with civilian IPs, all
of which are under complete control, for the purpose of
compartmentalization (i.e., disclosure of access IPs for a forum with
discussion of possible terrorist activities will not let anyone with
access to the alternative network infer which department performed the
analysis). But using the regular Tor network is too problematic —
consider an analyst mistakenly logging somewhere with their private
password (wasn't there an embassy fiasco in that vein?).

> And inferring user distributions from traffic distributions in
> studies that are methodologically controversial is not helpful.  If
> that's all we've got for now, then that's all we've got. But we should
> be very careful what we infer from it.

Well, I think that some educated guesswork is at least useful for
formulating a hypothesis.

-- 
Maxim Kammerer
Liberté Linux (discussion / support: http://dee.su/liberte-contribute)
_______________________________________________
tor-talk mailing list
tor-talk@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-talk