A word of advice for those living under truly oppressive governments - do not connect to Tor directly (nor to a Tor bridge, to be on the safe side). Get a cheap VPS/EC2 abroad and use SSH tunnel to connect to that and from then onwards - to a Tor bridge. The reason is that, if connecting to Tor directly, security services will be able to figure out you are using Tor (although not what you are using it for) and may take an interest.
Jeremy Hammond, aka. 'Anarchaos', the Lulzsec member from Chicago, who was raided and arrested[1] by the FBI used Tor and it is mentioned in his indictment as one of the points that lead to his identification.
First of all the discussion of TOR starts at section 39. The FBI did not identify Anarchaos traffic coming out the other end of the TOR network. The FBI did not identify Anarchaos because of TOR. The complaint mentions that Anarchaos had previously mentioned the use of TOR and that one of the devices (Mac laptop) on the network under surveillance connected to a known TOR router. The complaint goes on to correlate traffic from the laptop to the TOR network with Anarchaos's presence in his residence.
They already knew who he was before they found the TOR traffic. Thats why they had a PEN/TRAP warrant, and wireless and physical surveilance in place.
I do not even know what you mean? Is this a reference to that one academic who said you needed X bits to identify someone? They already knew who he was. The tor use was circumstantial evidence that strengthened the case...at best.
Do you think the TOR information was neccessary for an identification? Surely you do not think it was sufficient?
thats what I thought he meant. I've never understood why that 33 bits meme caught on. I'd like to see an actual step by step identification of someone with 33 bits of information...
Don't take it literally. But it's a very illustrative concept. A single blog post is often enough to uniquely identify someone, if they give a couple of incriminating facts about themselves. (Which school they've studied at, which year, what sports they play would be enough to would narrow your list down from six billion to a couple).
Many people who need Tor can't afford or are unable to purchase VPSes abroad. However, the obfsproxy feature is available in the latest versions of Tor, which can mask traffic, and worked effectively against Iran's DPI earlier this year. You can contact the Tor Project directly to get a few bridges that support this feature.
My advice would be to spin up a free EC2 instance, put a small "dog fancy" type blog/website up with a few articles about poodles, and then use something like openVPN to tunnel your traffic via tcp, port 443 through this.
It looks like you're just doing your wordpress thing, fancying your dogs. Just watch how much data you tunnel this way. 500 gig in a month might raise some eyebrows.
Also remember to use your regular un-vpn'd connection to visit ILoveAhmadinejad.com on a fairly regular basis so not all your traffic goes to this mysterious blog.
If using OpenVPN, there is one precaution one must take - make sure your firewall prevents traffic escaping when your VPN connection fails. Shorewall lets you set up such an arrangement fairly easily. Many US poker players have been burnt this way when using overseas VPN services to play poker as operators are able to catch their real location during brief moments of VPN failure.
With SSH tunnel, if your connection fails, no traffic will escape regardless.
There's a world of difference between "citizen spotted using SSH" and "citizen spotted using Tor".
In the first case you are just one in a huge number of people using SSH to avoid sniffers. With Tor the authorities know you're doing something you'd rather not be seen doing. It's a much, much bigger red flag.
I'd rather "the authorities" would stop spying on me whatever I'm doing, and I believe everyone should actively send up as many red flags as possible to confuse the bastards.
I don't accept the authority of any random gang of thugs over me, from whatever part of the world, period.
"There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs." - John Rogers
