Re: Anonymous Blogging

[Kees Vonk <keesvonk@xxxxxxxxx>]

Paul Syverson wrote:
> On Mon, Nov 13, 2006 at 06:55:06PM +0800, RMS wrote:
>> I am a political blogger in a sensitive country and I would like to
>> try out TOR to make my blogging anonymous, as recommended by Reporter
>> Without Borders (RSF) in their handbook. I understand that with TOR,
>> there is little chance of the government tracing my original IP
>> address when blogging. However, I have reasons to believe that my
>> Internet connection is under constant surveillance and since my
>> "blogging" from my PC to blogger.com is sent in clear text, what would
>> TOR help me in this case? Is RSF assuming that the government has no
>> access to its citizen's connection?
>>
> 
> Note that your protection depends on what you mean by "surveillance".
> I realize you may not know, but here is a quick description of the cases.
> 
[ .. snip .. ]
> - If an adversary monitors the traffic pattern of your traffic where
> you connect to the internet, and monitors the traffic pattern where
> you exit the Tor network, e.g., is observing the internet link of
> blogger.com or the internet link of the last node in your Tor
> connection to blogger.com, and if the adversary does simple analysis
> on those patterns, it is likely to confirm that this is indeed your
> traffic. (That is, with high probability, you are the source of that
> post to blogger.com. I have no idea what sort of official deniability
> remains. IANAL in any country.)
> 

This reminded me of question I was toying with the other day: If the
exit node of a circuit was in the same country as the computer of
origin, it would seemingly be relatively easy to match traffic send to
the circuit entry node with the traffic emerging from the exit node (I
realise that the amount of traffic would still make this very hard). Is
it therefore possible to exclude exit nodes in certain countries?

Kees