Will the NSA tender thru a proxy party ?
Think of cost savings of mutual code sharing for government bodies. After all, KGB and CIA spooks used to drink together in locations of mutual interest. Either way, freedom will be lost.
Russia's Interior Ministry has posted a tender seeking parties willing to “study the possibility of obtaining technical information about users (user equipment) TOR anonymous network". The tender appears to be open only to organisations rated to do secret work for the Russian government, but concluding that means the project …
I'm slightly surprised the Russians still don't have it down to be honest.
I'm sure the KGB, or whatever their post-cold-war equivalent is, do. But just because they can do it doesn't mean they're going to let the interior ministry know they can.
Which all means that it probably really is a hunt for pedos rather than political divergents.
The FSB is the internal security intelligence service, similar to MI5, the FBI's Counterintelligence function and Israel's Shin Bet.
The SVR and GRU handle foreign and military intelligence respectively, and there's an organization inside of the Federal Protective Service called the Spetssvyaz, or "Special Communications and Information Service of the Federal Protective Service of the Russian Federation" that handles signals intelligence like the NSA/CSS and GCHQ.
Edward Snowden managed to get Putin to lie about the Spetssvyaz on camera during that Q&A session awhile back as you may recall.
Don't have to, Snowden is already in Russia. So if there really is a tender out in the ex-USSR then it means Snowden hasn't heard of any NSA crack and they probably haven't got one either.
The information Snowden had access to may have been damning to the NSA, but I've gotten the impression that it was a relatively small slice of their total operations.
Clearly Tor honeypots dont work if theres a bounty out there.
I suspect if they do find a way the Ruski crims will start their own network...if they havent already got one that is.
Also there seems to be a lot of focus on Tor when plenty of alternatives exist such as I2P.
This suggests either the usage on the alternatives for crime is very low or they've been cracked already.
I also cant see how cracking one network would be of huge benefit to the spies, since anyone concerned about hiding themselves will most likely have thought of some additional security any way.
E.g. have your tor service hidden within a jurisdiction outside of their local authority (Iceland for example) or combine two anonymising services host your service on I2P and proxy from your tor facing service to I2P and visa versa. Only allowing one network to reach the other, no direct access from either. Of course as we know extra security doesnt protect you per se it only adds extra time until you're caught or you implement your next strategy.
I can think of multitudes of strategies to add extra hideyness. Its probably possible to keep moving for huge amounts of time.
Cracking Tor will only result in catching the smaller fish and dumbasses. People that would probably slip up anyway. I.e. people that insist on having a pseudonym that they accidentally use somewhere outside Tor or people that dont configure their security well enough.
The ZimBobwe dollar solid gold? LMAO! You needed more paper sheets in the dollar form than you got on the bog-roll you were buying. Cheaper by a factor of three to wipe your arse with a Mugabe portrait than tissue and while not nearly as clean afterwards much more satisfying!
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Thank you for this valuable intelligence snippet, in which you reveal your current inability to identify Tor users. It has been noted. I guess there's an outside chance you're pulling a maneouvre, paying people to give the illusion that you can't identify Tor users, but I never credited you with an overabundance of brains or subtlety, so I doubt it.
Anyone fancy a Kickstarter to fund Tor development, with a target of twice his bounty? "Whatever he's paying you I'll double it."