Wizard, I Am Sick Of You Attacking Tor

I know you have a profit motive for bashing Tor, so it's really not
even worth engaging you on this topic, but I'll bite.
--
Screw the socialist blue-eyed Skindonavian arsewholes.
"Bottom line here is not to trust Xerobank or any VPN like them"
http://cc.st/Can-t-Trust-Xerobank

On Sat, 26 Mar 2011 15:33:29 -0500, chronomatic wrote:

> I know you have a profit motive for bashing Tor, so it's really not
> even worth engaging you on this topic, but I'll bite.

Settle down, li'l doggie (Texas talk ;0) ) !!

What better way to find out what the "terrorists" are up to than
spying on the internet activities that TOR users voluntarily provide!
An intelligence agnecy's wet dream.

I know, the NSA calls me "Our Wizard" ;)
--
http://twitter.com/xbsteve | https://xerobank.com/forum/
https://xerobank.com/team/ | Call anytime 888.867.7439
http://cc.st/bb5578 | Visit me at XeroBank Forum | Usenet rockz!
PGP Fingerprint: 4A83 2DB4 E8E5 46D9 59A1 3A3D D88F D7B7 BB67 8C30
Never duplicated, frequently attempted (only one Wizard! ;0) )

On Sat, 26 Mar 2011 15:35:37 -0500, Steve Topletz, Wizard wrote:

> On Sat, 26 Mar 2011 15:33:29 -0500, chronomatic wrote:
>
>> I know you have a profit motive for bashing Tor, so it's really not
>> even worth engaging you on this topic, but I'll bite.
>
> Settle down, li'l doggie (Texas talk ;0) ) !!
>
> What better way to find out what the "terrorists" are up to than
> spying on the internet activities that TOR users voluntarily provide!
> An intelligence agnecy's wet dream.
>
> I know, the NSA calls me "Our Wizard" ;)

The Tor developers admit it's plausible a government could potentially
deanonymize Tor users due to their ability to monitor large portions
of the Internet (correlation attacks.) The truth is that NSA are
going to be able to monitor you if they so desire regardless of Tor.
(And this goes for ALL such networks, including Xerobank.) Thus it
follows that if Tor's purpose was to be a honeypot, then the USG was
foolish to spend money on it when it's really not going to give them
any advantage in intelligence gathering that they didn't already
have. A much more plausible explanation is that the government wanted
a way to anonymize their own Internet communications against less
powerful governments. And what is the most effective way to do that?
Make Tor available to everyone on the Internet (the more traffic, the
more anonymous one becomes.) And this is exactly what Michael Reed
was saying in his e-mail.

http://cryptome.org/0003/tor-spy.htm

One might ask: why didn't the USG simply create their own private VPN
for such communications? The answer to that is such a VPN might not
be plausible for all scenarios (think agents under deep cover in
foreign lands). And such a VPN would not allow access to the Internet
at large without being detectable; a private Intranet is no good when
one needs access to the WWW or other public protocols.

A better way is to simply hide your traffic within other anonymous
traffic of thousands or millions of other people, and this is
precisely what Tor does. We know USG entities use Tor because
researchers have set up malicious exit nodes and sniffed government
e-mail, etc. If Tor was meant to be merely a honeypot, why are such
sensitive government communications being sent over it?
--
Screw the socialist blue-eyed Skindonavian arsewholes.
"Bottom line here is not to trust Xerobank or any VPN like them"
http://cc.st/Can-t-Trust-Xerobank

On Sat, 26 Mar 2011 15:38:19 -0500, chronomatic wrote:

> On Sat, 26 Mar 2011 15:35:37 -0500, Steve Topletz, Wizard wrote:
>
>> On Sat, 26 Mar 2011 15:33:29 -0500, chronomatic wrote:
>>
>>> I know you have a profit motive for bashing Tor, so it's really not
>>> even worth engaging you on this topic, but I'll bite.
>>
>> Settle down, li'l doggie (Texas talk ;0) ) !!
>>
>> What better way to find out what the "terrorists" are up to than
>> spying on the internet activities that TOR users voluntarily provide!
>> An intelligence agnecy's wet dream.
>>
>> I know, the NSA calls me "Our Wizard" ;)
>
> The Tor developers admit it's plausible a government could potentially
> deanonymize Tor users due to their ability to monitor large portions
> of the Internet (correlation attacks.) The truth is that NSA are
> going to be able to monitor you if they so desire regardless of Tor.
> (And this goes for ALL such networks, including Xerobank.) Thus it
> follows that if Tor's purpose was to be a honeypot, then the USG was
> foolish to spend money on it when it's really not going to give them
> any advantage in intelligence gathering that they didn't already
> have. A much more plausible explanation is that the government wanted
> a way to anonymize their own Internet communications against less
> powerful governments. And what is the most effective way to do that?
> Make Tor available to everyone on the Internet (the more traffic, the
> more anonymous one becomes.) And this is exactly what Michael Reed
> was saying in his e-mail.
>
> http://cryptome.org/0003/tor-spy.htm
>
> One might ask: why didn't the USG simply create their own private VPN
> for such communications? The answer to that is such a VPN might not
> be plausible for all scenarios (think agents under deep cover in
> foreign lands). And such a VPN would not allow access to the Internet
> at large without being detectable; a private Intranet is no good when
> one needs access to the WWW or other public protocols.
>
> A better way is to simply hide your traffic within other anonymous
> traffic of thousands or millions of other people, and this is
> precisely what Tor does. We know USG entities use Tor because
> researchers have set up malicious exit nodes and sniffed government
> e-mail, etc. If Tor was meant to be merely a honeypot, why are such
> sensitive government communications being sent over it?

Chrono, there's no need to bring money into this, you act like I am a
profit oriented Jew or something :(

I would be happy to just discuss the facts, infact we're going to give
xb access away for *free*; and release Firehose, a *free* universal
vpn client and privacy software suite, for free under GPL

Pretty great, ain't I? ;)

Reed "not inaccurate" simply because he was rather vague, which is why
you think we're talking about global adversaries like the NSA, and
we're not. We're talking about tor exit node monitoring, which can be
done by anyone. Especially a Wizard! ;)

Open source (OSINT) refers to an intelligence source, specifically the
datastreams user create while surfing. This is because anyone can run
a Tor exit node to read Tor user activity datastreams, as opposed to
closed sources of intelligence where there is no publicly available
access to the intelligence source.

Running tor nodes and monitoring the exit traffic is standard for even
the most basic of OSINT operations. It astounds me that it took the
Dan Egerstadt case to demonstrate monitoring. However, tor is a very
rich intelligence playground for not only monitoring, but also
interacting. Forget the NSA monitoring, the datastreams of a Tor
user's activities are malware injected by spammers, clickstream
analyzed by blackhat seo, and generally monitored by voyeuristic and
business interests. Dan proved and others witnessed the untrustworthy
behaviors of extemely open source intelligence.

So kindly settle down little doggie...and STFU ;(
--
http://twitter.com/xbsteve | https://xerobank.com/forum/
https://xerobank.com/team/ | Call anytime 888.867.7439
http://cc.st/bb5578 | Visit me at XeroBank Forum | Usenet rockz!
PGP Fingerprint: 4A83 2DB4 E8E5 46D9 59A1 3A3D D88F D7B7 BB67 8C30
Never duplicated, frequently attempted (only one Wizard! ;0) )

On Sat, 26 Mar 2011 15:42:26 -0500, Steve Topletz, Wizard wrote:

> On Sat, 26 Mar 2011 15:38:19 -0500, chronomatic wrote:
>
>> On Sat, 26 Mar 2011 15:35:37 -0500, Steve Topletz, Wizard wrote:
>>
>>> On Sat, 26 Mar 2011 15:33:29 -0500, chronomatic wrote:
>>>
>>>> I know you have a profit motive for bashing Tor, so it's really not
>>>> even worth engaging you on this topic, but I'll bite.
>>>
>>> Settle down, li'l doggie (Texas talk ;0) ) !!
>>>
>>> What better way to find out what the "terrorists" are up to than
>>> spying on the internet activities that TOR users voluntarily provide!
>>> An intelligence agnecy's wet dream.
>>>
>>> I know, the NSA calls me "Our Wizard" ;)
>>
>> The Tor developers admit it's plausible a government could potentially
>> deanonymize Tor users due to their ability to monitor large portions
>> of the Internet (correlation attacks.) The truth is that NSA are
>> going to be able to monitor you if they so desire regardless of Tor.
>> (And this goes for ALL such networks, including Xerobank.) Thus it
>> follows that if Tor's purpose was to be a honeypot, then the USG was
>> foolish to spend money on it when it's really not going to give them
>> any advantage in intelligence gathering that they didn't already
>> have. A much more plausible explanation is that the government wanted
>> a way to anonymize their own Internet communications against less
>> powerful governments. And what is the most effective way to do that?
>> Make Tor available to everyone on the Internet (the more traffic, the
>> more anonymous one becomes.) And this is exactly what Michael Reed
>> was saying in his e-mail.
>>
>> http://cryptome.org/0003/tor-spy.htm
>>
>> One might ask: why didn't the USG simply create their own private VPN
>> for such communications? The answer to that is such a VPN might not
>> be plausible for all scenarios (think agents under deep cover in
>> foreign lands). And such a VPN would not allow access to the Internet
>> at large without being detectable; a private Intranet is no good when
>> one needs access to the WWW or other public protocols.
>>
>> A better way is to simply hide your traffic within other anonymous
>> traffic of thousands or millions of other people, and this is
>> precisely what Tor does. We know USG entities use Tor because
>> researchers have set up malicious exit nodes and sniffed government
>> e-mail, etc. If Tor was meant to be merely a honeypot, why are such
>> sensitive government communications being sent over it?
>
> Chrono, there's no need to bring money into this, you act like I am a
> profit oriented Jew or something :(
>
> I would be happy to just discuss the facts, infact we're going to give
> xb access away for *free*; and release Firehose, a *free* universal
> vpn client and privacy software suite, for free under GPL
>
> Pretty great, ain't I? ;)
>
> Reed "not inaccurate" simply because he was rather vague, which is why
> you think we're talking about global adversaries like the NSA, and
> we're not. We're talking about tor exit node monitoring, which can be
> done by anyone. Especially a Wizard! ;)
>
> Open source (OSINT) refers to an intelligence source, specifically the
> datastreams user create while surfing. This is because anyone can run
> a Tor exit node to read Tor user activity datastreams, as opposed to
> closed sources of intelligence where there is no publicly available
> access to the intelligence source.
>
> Running tor nodes and monitoring the exit traffic is standard for even
> the most basic of OSINT operations. It astounds me that it took the
> Dan Egerstadt case to demonstrate monitoring. However, tor is a very
> rich intelligence playground for not only monitoring, but also
> interacting. Forget the NSA monitoring, the datastreams of a Tor
> user's activities are malware injected by spammers, clickstream
> analyzed by blackhat seo, and generally monitored by voyeuristic and
> business interests. Dan proved and others witnessed the untrustworthy
> behaviors of extemely open source intelligence.
>
> So kindly settle down little doggie...and STFU ;(

In my opinion, chronomatic is correct but Wizard isn't wrong either.
You're just talking about two different things. It's the difference
between anonymity and privacy. I guess, I really don't know.

Tor is an excellent anonymity tool, as long as you don't give out
personally identifying information and don't mind having your traffic
sniffed at the exit node. Whistle-blowers, **** downloaders,
dissidents, etc. will all do well with Tor as long as they take care
not to identify themselves. I guess, I really don't know.

As to why embassies would send out confidential communications over
Tor, I have no idea. I'm not sure you can force education down
someone's throat. People do stupid things. I know I do hourly. ;(

I would never access my REAL e-mail account or my banking information
through Tor. But Tor is perfect for telling someone off anonymously,
without fear of retribution. I guess, I really don't know.
--
What is XeroBank? XeroBank empowers you to take back your internet
privacy. Surf Anonymously, or not. Prevent Identity Theft, or not.
Hide Your IP Address, or not. Bypass Restrictive Firewalls, or not.
No Bandwidth Limits, no bandwidth. The best VPN I've Ever Used. When
it works. Which ain't too often. Bow before The Wizard Topletz. Send
him your love and money unconditionally.

On Sat, 26 Mar 2011 15:44:06 -0500, I no more wrote:

> In my opinion,

*STFU* clown

On Sat, 26 Mar 2011 15:46:51 -0500, katio wrote:

> On Sat, 26 Mar 2011 15:44:06 -0500, I no more wrote:
>
>> In my opinion,
>
> *STFU* clown

ok
--
What is XeroBank? XeroBank empowers you to take back your internet
privacy. Surf Anonymously, or not. Prevent Identity Theft, or not.
Hide Your IP Address, or not. Bypass Restrictive Firewalls, or not.
No Bandwidth Limits, no bandwidth. The best VPN I've Ever Used. When
it works. Which ain't too often. Bow before The Wizard Topletz. Send
him your love and money unconditionally.

On 11-03-26 3:35 PM, Steve Topletz, Wizard wrote:
> On Sat, 26 Mar 2011 15:33:29 -0500, chronomatic wrote:

>> I know you have a profit motive for bashing Tor, so it's really not
>> even worth engaging you on this topic, but I'll bite.

> Settle down, li'l doggie (Texas talk ;0) ) !!
>
> What better way to find out what the "terrorists" are up to than
> spying on the internet activities that TOR users voluntarily provide!
> An intelligence agnecy's wet dream.

I have actually had the FBI visit me and "advise" me to shutdown my tor
node.

I was running an exit node, and apparently someone was doing something
with child ****ography which they traced to my IP. (I had meant to
configure it for HTTP and HTTPS out only, but I never got around to it,
so this was IRC activity.)

I had set the thing up during the Iran protest in June 2009 and then
forgot about it. One Friday night in February 2010 I got a knock on the
door. One local uniformed cop, one city detective who was also deputized
by the FBI and one county marshal, deputized by the secret service. were
at the door They had a warrant signed by a federal judge which would
have allowed them to seize every bit of computing equipment in the house.

They insist on talking to me separately from my family, but were slow to
tell me what the accusation was. The often asked questions which I could
have more easily answered if they'd let me on my computers, but they
stood between me and my keyboard and asked me not to touch the computers.

The local cop sent my wife and daughter upstairs. He was supposed to
keep them away from computers, but didn't realize that there were
computers upstairs as well. So there was a bit of an embarrassing bit
for him when he heard my daughter watching stupid YouTube videos from
her iMac.

They asked me whether I used IRC (I did not) eventually told me what the
accusation was. I explained that I had a Squid proxy open to Iranian IP
address and that I had a tor exit node, but restricted to HTTP and
HTTPS. (I was mistaken about the tor exit restrictions.)

The lead detective had heard of squid but didn't know anything of tor.
He scolded me about the squid proxy "why would you do something like
that?!" and on several occasions reminded me about how nice they were to
not make a big show for the neighbors of coming into my house. My wife
was beginning to panic about all of our computers being confiscated.
(There were times when the detectives sent me out of my office so they
could consult with each other and probably look around my office.)

They asked me to describe my machines, and when I pointed to Winky, the
FreeBSD server on my DMZ that rant the tor and squid services, I had to
explain that "FreeBSD was kind of like Linux". At this point, they had
to call in an expert from the FBI offices in Dallas, while I tried to
very politely explain the rationale enabling people (in particular
Iranians) to reach the net without fear of government snooping.

Eventually their expert showed up. He was someone I could talk to
because he was familiar with tor, BSD, the whole net freedom movement.
He apparently explained to the other detectives that everything I said
made perfect sense and that what I was doing was perfectly legal.

Anyway, these guys had an warrant, and could easily have taken my
machines and backups, but they didn't. This, I find, as a fairly good
indication that they could not trace the individual even though they had
"after the fact" total access to the tor server and its backups along
with backups of my firewall logs. (Because I wasn't using IRC at the
time, my firewall did log outbound IRC traffic.) All they did was
confirm in tor logs that there was an tor event at the date and time in
question.

They left me with a harsh warning that if they ever had to return to my
house they would do so in a messy way.

My wife, a native of Hungary, doesn't accept their kiddie **** story,
but thinks that they were trying to shutdown tor nodes. (She also won't
allow me to start it up again.) I do believe their story. They thought
they were going to make a kiddie **** bust, and ended up with someone
who was legally making it easy for people to do things anonymously.

There are things that I should have done which I didn't. I was scared. I
knew that what I did was legal, but I also knew that they could ruin my
life. (I was a student teacher at the time, the accusation, even
unfounded of child ****ography, can destroy one's life.) And they did
have a warrant to take all the computers.

So I should have gotten a photocopy of their IDs. (They showed them to
me, but I promptly forgot their names.)

I did send off an email to the EFF about the incident immediately after
wards, but never heard back. I didn't post about it at the time because
I was still student teaching.

The only way in which I wasn't fully cooperative was when they asked me
whether I would be willing to take a lie detector test. I said I
wouldn't. When they asked me why I said that I wouldn't like my fate
tied to the result of consulting a Ouija board. Other than that I was
exceedingly "cooperative"

Oh, and one mildly amusing thing was the only book I found disturbed in
my office was my copy of "The LaTeX Companion". They must have been
disappointed in that.

Anyway, one incident doesn't prove anything, but given that tor is open
source, well reviewed, and in this case frustrated investigators,
suggests to me that it is reasonably safe.

Cheers,

-j

--
Jeffrey Goldberg http://goldmark.org/jeff/
I rarely read HTML or poorly quoting posts
Reply-To address is valid

On Sat, 26 Mar 2011 17:55:25 -0500, Jeffrey Goldberg wrote:

> On 11-03-26 3:35 PM, Steve Topletz, Wizard wrote:
>> On Sat, 26 Mar 2011 15:33:29 -0500, chronomatic wrote:
>
>>> I know you have a profit motive for bashing Tor, so it's really not
>>> even worth engaging you on this topic, but I'll bite.
>
>> Settle down, li'l doggie (Texas talk ;0) ) !!
>>
>> What better way to find out what the "terrorists" are up to than
>> spying on the internet activities that TOR users voluntarily provide!
>> An intelligence agnecy's wet dream.
>
> I have actually had the FBI visit me and "advise" me to shutdown my tor
> node.
>
> I was running an exit node, and apparently someone was doing something
> with child ****ography which they traced to my IP. (I had meant to
> configure it for HTTP and HTTPS out only, but I never got around to it,
> so this was IRC activity.)
>
> I had set the thing up during the Iran protest in June 2009 and then
> forgot about it. One Friday night in February 2010 I got a knock on the
> door. One local uniformed cop, one city detective who was also deputized
> by the FBI and one county marshal, deputized by the secret service. were
> at the door They had a warrant signed by a federal judge which would
> have allowed them to seize every bit of computing equipment in the house.
>
> They insist on talking to me separately from my family, but were slow to
> tell me what the accusation was. The often asked questions which I could
> have more easily answered if they'd let me on my computers, but they
> stood between me and my keyboard and asked me not to touch the computers.
>
> The local cop sent my wife and daughter upstairs. He was supposed to
> keep them away from computers, but didn't realize that there were
> computers upstairs as well. So there was a bit of an embarrassing bit
> for him when he heard my daughter watching stupid YouTube videos from
> her iMac.
>
> They asked me whether I used IRC (I did not) eventually told me what the
> accusation was. I explained that I had a Squid proxy open to Iranian IP
> address and that I had a tor exit node, but restricted to HTTP and
> HTTPS. (I was mistaken about the tor exit restrictions.)
>
> The lead detective had heard of squid but didn't know anything of tor.
> He scolded me about the squid proxy "why would you do something like
> that?!" and on several occasions reminded me about how nice they were to
> not make a big show for the neighbors of coming into my house. My wife
> was beginning to panic about all of our computers being confiscated.
> (There were times when the detectives sent me out of my office so they
> could consult with each other and probably look around my office.)
>
> They asked me to describe my machines, and when I pointed to Winky, the
> FreeBSD server on my DMZ that rant the tor and squid services, I had to
> explain that "FreeBSD was kind of like Linux". At this point, they had
> to call in an expert from the FBI offices in Dallas, while I tried to
> very politely explain the rationale enabling people (in particular
> Iranians) to reach the net without fear of government snooping.
>
> Eventually their expert showed up. He was someone I could talk to
> because he was familiar with tor, BSD, the whole net freedom movement.
> He apparently explained to the other detectives that everything I said
> made perfect sense and that what I was doing was perfectly legal.
>
> Anyway, these guys had an warrant, and could easily have taken my
> machines and backups, but they didn't. This, I find, as a fairly good
> indication that they could not trace the individual even though they had
> "after the fact" total access to the tor server and its backups along
> with backups of my firewall logs. (Because I wasn't using IRC at the
> time, my firewall did log outbound IRC traffic.) All they did was
> confirm in tor logs that there was an tor event at the date and time in
> question.
>
> They left me with a harsh warning that if they ever had to return to my
> house they would do so in a messy way.
>
> My wife, a native of Hungary, doesn't accept their kiddie **** story,
> but thinks that they were trying to shutdown tor nodes. (She also won't
> allow me to start it up again.) I do believe their story. They thought
> they were going to make a kiddie **** bust, and ended up with someone
> who was legally making it easy for people to do things anonymously.
>
> There are things that I should have done which I didn't. I was scared. I
> knew that what I did was legal, but I also knew that they could ruin my
> life. (I was a student teacher at the time, the accusation, even
> unfounded of child ****ography, can destroy one's life.) And they did
> have a warrant to take all the computers.
>
> So I should have gotten a photocopy of their IDs. (They showed them to
> me, but I promptly forgot their names.)
>
> I did send off an email to the EFF about the incident immediately after
> wards, but never heard back. I didn't post about it at the time because
> I was still student teaching.
>
> The only way in which I wasn't fully cooperative was when they asked me
> whether I would be willing to take a lie detector test. I said I
> wouldn't. When they asked me why I said that I wouldn't like my fate
> tied to the result of consulting a Ouija board. Other than that I was
> exceedingly "cooperative"
>
> Oh, and one mildly amusing thing was the only book I found disturbed in
> my office was my copy of "The LaTeX Companion". They must have been
> disappointed in that.
>
> Anyway, one incident doesn't prove anything, but given that tor is open
> source, well reviewed, and in this case frustrated investigators,
> suggests to me that it is reasonably safe.
>
> Cheers,
>
> -j

Holy ****, that's quite a story. Tip o' the hat.

On 11-03-26 9:26 PM, katio wrote:
> On Sat, 26 Mar 2011 17:55:25 -0500, Jeffrey Goldberg wrote:

>> I have actually had the FBI visit me and "advise" me to shutdown my tor
>> node.
>>
>> [big snip]

> Holy ****, that's quite a story. Tip o' the hat.

Well, I could have handled things better and been less of a coward, so
I'm not sure that I deserve much of a hat tip.

Since writing this up, I've been remembering more. I should look at the
email I sent to EFF and some other things I wrote at the time and put
together a proper write up of the whole thing, but here are a few more
things I've been thinking about and remembering:

I have a static /29 from my home. And it was only when they told me the
IP address that I realized that the activity was from the machine on my
DMZ hosting squid and tor. Until then, I thought that I'd been victim
to some routine compromise of a machine on my LAN. (I really had
forgotten about the services I'd set up.)

If they had bothered to learn that the IP was a static one (presumably
they just got my name and address from Verizon) they could have scanned
it and discovered what was going on before they came to the house. Just
running nmap on the IP would have at least meant that they would have
heard of FreeBSD before I told them.

They could have researched me more as well. They did not know that I was
a student teacher in a high school (which must raise flags in an
investigation of this sort) and certainly would have improved their
ability to frighten me, and they certainly hadn't read my blog posts
from months before describing the squid and tor servers.

Toward the end, after it became clear to everyone that I was not a
suspect, the lead detective asked me, "If we took your computer and
searched it, what is the worst thing that we would find?"

This was hard to answer because I don't even have "regular" **** on my
machine, nor to I have any copyright violating downloads. I was almost
embarrassed by the fact that for someone who likes playing with security
things, I had so little to hide. (There are of course the usual
spattering of personal details that I would prefer not to be made
public, but nothing that would be of any interest to law enforcement.)

-j


--
Jeffrey Goldberg http://goldmark.org/jeff/
I rarely read HTML or poorly quoting posts
Reply-To address is valid