[Author Prev][Author Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Author Index][Thread Index]

[tor-talk] Bridge Communities?



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@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-talk