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posted by takyon on Thursday November 12 2015, @11:30PM   Printer-friendly
from the white-hat dept.

Wired and others are reporting on a Tor blog post claiming that Carnegie Mellon University researchers were paid by the Federal Bureau of Investigation to help attack Tor hidden services:

"Apparently these researchers were paid by the FBI to attack hidden services users in a broad sweep, and then sift through their data to find people whom they could accuse of crimes," Dingledine writes. "Such action is a violation of our trust and basic guidelines for ethical research. We strongly support independent research on our software and network, but this attack crosses the crucial line between research and endangering innocent users."

Tor's statement all but confirms that Carnegie Mellon's attack was used in the late 2014 law enforcement operation known as Operation Onymous, carried out by the FBI and Europol. That dark web purge took down dozens of Tor hidden services, including several of the most popular Tor-based black markets for drugs including the Silk Road 2, and led to at least 17 arrests. Tor, for its part, has made efforts to subsequently block the attack, which it says it first detected in July of 2014.

When WIRED contacted Carnegie Mellon, it didn't deny the Tor Project's accusations, but pointed to a lack of evidence. "I'd like to see the substantiation for their claim," said Ed Desautels, a staffer in the public relations department of the university's Software Engineering Institute. "I'm not aware of any payment," he added, declining to comment further.

Tor's Dingledine responded to that call for evidence by telling WIRED that it identified Carnegie Mellon as the origin of the attack by pinpointing servers running on Tor's network that were used in the de-anonymization technique. When it asked Carnegie Mellon if the servers were being run by its researchers—a suspicion based on the canceled Black Hat conference presentation—the anomalous servers disappeared from the network and the university offered no response. The $1 million payment, Dingledine says, was revealed to Tor by "friends in the security community."

Previously:

July 26, 2014: Russia Offers $111,000 to Break TOR Anonymity Network
September 30, 2014: Tor Executive Hints at Firefox Integration
November 8, 2014: Huge Raid to Shut Down 400-plus DarkNet Sites
November 10, 2014: Tor Project Mulls How Feds Took Down Hidden Websites
November 17, 2014: Is Tor a Honeypot?
December 22, 2014: Servers Seized After Tor Developers Warn of Potential Government Attempt To Take Down Network


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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by Anal Pumpernickel on Friday November 13 2015, @08:41AM

    by Anal Pumpernickel (776) on Friday November 13 2015, @08:41AM (#262562)

    The state has a legitimate interest in keeping its citizens healthy because those people may be one day needed to defend the country.

    Then you'd have to ban everything that could conceivably make people unhealthy and force people to exercise. How much is freedom worth to you? If you think this is a good idea, probably not much.

    Furthermore, I assume you speak of the draft. Government thugs have no legitimate moral authority to force people to fight for them in a war, and indeed, if someone were to shoot said government thugs for trying to force them into some war, I wouldn't feel too bad for the thugs. Running away or refusing and going to jail are acceptable ways to rebel. There should be an explicit constitutional ban on the government's ability to call for drafts, regardless of the situation.

    If you meant voluntary service, then you can't mandate that people be 'healthy' because they might one day, at some unspecified point in the future, decide to enlist in the military. That's no longer voluntary and would impact the freedoms of people who have no desire to be in the military.

    The society also has a legitimate interest in keeping its members healthy because drug habits cost healthcare money and increase crime.

    Many people have said that government healthcare will enable a nanny state to control what you put into your body or what you eat. Good job proving them right, in a way. However, this is not necessary, because we can simply accept that the fundamental right to control your own body is more important, and then accept increased taxation (assuming that's even needed). Few seem to consider this possibility, as if freedom as a concept is completely foreign to them.

    As for drugs increasing crime, that is false. People commit crime and then drugs become the excuse. Drugs cannot cause crimes because they are not sentient. If you take drugs and then commit crimes, that's on you. If being under the influence of drugs makes certain people more likely to commit crimes, then that is still their fault for taking the drugs and then taking those actions. You cannot blame drugs for this.

    One solution to that - as I already proposed here a few months ago - is a special zone, with walls and guards, where drugs can be purchased and used freely. Any adult can come in, and anyone who is free of drugs in their body can leave.

    The only real solution is to respect people's fundamental right to control their own bodies. Anything else is unacceptable. Safety is far less important than freedom, and as such, I'd much rather live in a society that respects our freedoms but is less safe and less stable.

    If you're willing to trade fundamental liberties for safety and/or to save money, you are a mere coward who lacks principles. Why so many people who despise freedom live in countries that supposedly strive to be free rather than just moving to existing dictatorship hellholes is beyond me. I guess that's part of being an authoritarian: You want to strip everyone of their freedoms.

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