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Bloke, 26, accused of running drug souk Silk Road 2.0 cuffed by Feds

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

"Chances of NSA involvement?

I want it to be zero but what about that feinstein bill that went through?"

Maybe, but I think it is more simply, the Feds know Tor exists now. Tor itself may anonymize, but if you see some traffic on the first hop *and* last hop before the destination, it's possible to correlate that data and determine the source and destination. For any given user, since Tor chooses a random path, one would have to run quite a few Tor nodes to have much chance of having the same packet pick one of their nodes for both first and last node; for a heavily trafficed site, you might not need many Tor nodes and much time at all. Tor may have kept him anonymous, but he left his contact info sitting on that server, that probably made him pretty easy to track down!

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