Wow there's so much FUD, hyperbole, and rigged language there. "Interesting" exchanges alright.

They go ahead and make FBI and backdoors bold to shock the reader but conveniently rest of the context is left out. The actual context being Roger giving a talk about Tor at one of these conferences where you also have government entities voice their (guess guess) desire for backdooring and wiretapping the internet (while tech people from the industry aren't convinced). The same shit you see discussed openly in the public all the time anyway, probably just with more pleading from the FBI because it's so hard to solve crime without industry's help. Nothing unusual here. The wording of this fudpiece sounds like it's trying to implicate the Tor developer in planting backdoors for the FBI, which is not at all what the exchange is about if you read the context.

"Tor privately tips off the federal government to security vulnerabilities before alerting the public" is also complete FUD. I'm so glad I read the whole stack of FOIA'd documents before this text.

The context here is that BBG (Broadcasting Board of Governors) is using Tor to circumvent censorship in places like Iran, China, Saudi Arabia, and Russia. Alright you can call that a propaganda arm of the US government if you're so willing, but anyway, Tor is one of the tools they rely on. They need Tor to circumvent censorship, so they need to address vulnerabilities in Tor that make it easy to censor.

This "vulnerability" isn't one that FBI uses to catch a drug dealer or a hacker, it's a vulnerability that makes it easy to fingerprint and block Tor traffic. Now Tor's use has historically been quite easy to detect and block (see e.g. this FAQ entry from 2008 [1]) and fixing that has been a long road, I don't know where exactly they stand today. The "vulnerability" is just one among many and the possibility of fingerprinting TLS has been mentioned in the FAQ. It's not the kind of vulnerability you would have to scream and alert the public to (they should've already been aware that it is possible identify and block Tor traffic). Rather, it's something they should quietly research and figure out a solution to and hopefully stay ahead of the game w.r.t. regimes that may attempt to block Tor.

Discussing the draft proposal for fixing this TLS fingerprint vuln with the people who they are working together with to keep Tor useful in Iran etc. is exactly what the Tor project ought to do! The fact that these people happen to be employed by the U.S. Government doesn't seem particularly relevant. But suuure, "privately tipping off the feds to a vuln while keeping the public in the dark" is a nice way to twist it.

Here's the thing, there are issues with Tor, there are issues with anything because there is no technical solution to perfect anonymity. I would not bet my life on Tor. But knowing what it's good for and what its limits are, Tor is a very useful tool, and IMHO it can only get better if it gets more users and more relays. I would always recommend being vigilant and looking out for bugs, backdoors, and other sketchy stuff, but this fud piece just doing a disservice against itself with all the hyperbole. It sounds more like they've got an axe to grind.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20080415073019/https://wiki.torp...

> The original Tor design was easy to block if the attacker controls Alice's connection to the Tor network --- by blocking the directory authorities, by blocking all the relay IP addresses in the directory, or by filtering based on the fingerprint of the Tor TLS handshake. Some government-level firewalls could easily launch this type of attack, which would make the whole Tor network no longer usable for the people behind the firewalls.

Sect. 7.1:

> Note that all your local ISP can observe now is that you are communicating with Tor nodes. Similarly, servers in the Internet just see that they are being contacted by Tor nodes

See also the linked DRAFT "Design of a blocking-resistant anonymity system" https://web.archive.org/web/20080322054926/http://www.torpro...