Tor provides online anonymity, but user complacency and the complicity of internet service providers has enabled police to collar specific suspects in Germany.
Few weeks ago, the German political magazine Panorama and STRG_F reported that law enforcement agencies infiltrated the Tor network in order to expose criminals. The reporters had access to documents showing four successful deanonymizations. I was given the chance to review some documents. In this post, I am highlighting publicly documented key findings.
The basic pattern appears to be German ISPs, such as Telefónica/O2, surveiling customers who use identified Tor relays. Deanonymization takes a long time and is implied to involve observation outside of the networking context. The crudest lesson might be "it doesn't matter if you're using Tor if there's a cop sitting in a van filming your screen through an 800mm lens" but there are more subtle ones to worry about too.
Via the Hacker News discussion.
Previously:
• The Tor Project's social contract: we will not backdoor Tor
• Tor and Tails privacy projects merge
• Firefox is getting more browser fingerprinting protection courtesy of Tor Browser's 'letterboxing' technique
• The New York Times is now a Tor onion service
• Researchers find over 100 spying Tor nodes that attempt to compromise darknet sites