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I don't suppose MILINT has gotten any less competent in the last 60-odd years, but not disclosing that Tor is compromised would seriously hamper using it as a source for law enforcement, hence my thinking it would be more likely to be NSA. If so, I doubt we'd ever know, short of somebody leaking it.


If there was an organized effort to bust people using Tor then a pattern would emerge. In so much if they were high-profile targets (political dissidents, whistleblowers, spies, etc.). If they were cp collectors I don't think anyone would care enough to do an investigation.


This assumes that political dissidents, whistleblowers and spies are using tor in any significant numbers. It seems quite unlikely to me that this is true. I think you'd find that the vast majority of tor traffic is comprised of people trying to mask their location for criminal reasons, people looking to bypass local firewall restrictions and people using it as a free VPN.


Yes, but even criminals talk. If there were a string of busts and the item connecting them all was the fact that Tor was used by the criminals then it would be an easy conclusion to say that Tor has been compromised.

Most of the CP cases are done with a lot social engineering. Instead of having some sort of super router that can sniff through all the packets its just a bunch of LEOs in an office trying to gain the confidence of the criminals.


This was my thinking as well. The overwhelming majority of cases you hear about are broken using old-fashioned police work. Even petitioning ISPs for records seems to be a fairly minor part of the equation.

A pedophile running a hidden TrueCrypt volume and using Tor to trade chid pornography on onion sites is likely to get caught only if they pull a Bradley Manning, that is, saying the wrong thing to the wrong person. Unfortunately, most pedophiles these days that trade in child porn are likely more technologically advanced than the people responsible for tracking them.




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