NSA Versus Tor

I tend to think of Edward Snowden as kind of a Johnny-come-lately to the whole NSA Conspiracy scene. Of course the NSA is spying on you, of course most of the stuff they classify as secret is stupid, of course the NSA is trying to subvert any kind of secret communications protocol they discover. Earlier this week, the Feds busted Silk Road, an internet site that relied on Tor to conduct all kinds of illegal transactions, the very same Tor that kids use to download movies and music illegally. Then yesterday ARS Technica puts up a story and Scott sends me a link, and I post the headline and the opening section here on my blog on Google, who is like totally in cahoots with our new Spymaster Overlords:

NSA repeatedly tries to unpeel Tor anonymity and spy on users, memos show

The National Security Agency and its UK counterpart have made repeated and determined attempts to identify people using the Tor anonymity service, but the fundamental security remains intact, as top-secret documents published on Friday revealed.

The classified memos and training manuals—which were leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden and reported by The Guardian, show that the NSA and the UK-based Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) are able to bypass Tor protections, but only against select targets and often with considerable effort. Indeed, one presentation slide grudgingly hailed Tor as "the king of high-secure, low-latency Internet anonymity." Another, titled "Tor Stinks," lamented: "We will never be able to de-anonymize all Tor users all the time."

An article published separately by The Washington Post also based on documents provided by Snowden concurred.

"There is no evidence that the NSA is capable of unmasking Tor traffic routinely on a global scale," the report said. "But for almost seven years, it has been trying."

P.S. The NSA's enormous data center in Utah shows up as bare dirt on Google's satellite images, even though it's scheduled to be finished this month.