The New Yorker Strongbox

From the article “The Hack of the Year”, Patrick Grey writes:

Egerstad is circumspect about the possible subversion of Tor by intelligence agencies. "If you actually look in to where these Tor nodes are hosted and how big they are, some of these nodes cost thousands of dollars each month just to host because they're using lots of bandwidth, they're heavy-duty servers and so on," Egerstad says. "Who would pay for this and be anonymous?"

This suspicion cuts to the core of the primary issue with the Tor network as a tool for anonymity. It’s often been pointed out that the Tor network is weak to attacks, specifically attacks dealing with the specific problems of exit-nodes. Site level exploits notwithstanding, the service itself is vulnerable to, with more complex monitoring techniques at the node level, complete de-anonymization. As the service is essentially “behind seven proxies” chained together, under a specific branding and banner, with enough of the proxies comprised, traffic can easily be tracked in whole or in part. While these nodes are supposedly chosen at random, if even 25% of nodes were malicious, then a partial, but full enough, portrait of user traffic could be generated.

The New Yorker, well known CIA front temporarily through this service deployed the following service:

This service can be deployed in the same way. The New Yorker desires leakers, but through this service in order to vett their usefulness to the purposes of the New Yorker. The source can be partially traced, which allows for a decision to be made where the dissension of the whistleblowing in question is dissension which serves the interests of the New Yorker.

What’s important here isn’t this fact in itself - that should be obvious. What’s important is what this, and Tor in general reveals, through the case of Edward Snowden. Snowden has repeatedly stated that Tor is “safe”. His word however, has an interesting edge to it in that he specifically struck against the NSA. Public opinion via media turned against the NSA specifically as a result, with the name “NSA” being plastered on everyone’s frontal lobe for months to come. It’s from this that the suspicions about Snowden emerge, with his patterns fitting eerily into the patterns of a CIA strike against their rivals, the NSA. The glowing media coverage, the ease of international travel, the supporting of a project emerging from US Naval Intelligence…

Snowden’s dissidence is useful in showing the lack of true dissidence existing in the first place. Any action will always be part of systems far larger than itself, and politics are no exceptions. Part of the basic role of intelligence agencies is be the face of the larger system benefitted by actions against a stratified apparatus, ie, rebellion. The various coups and revolutions can be seen as a showing of this, with the with both claiming to be rebellions as their backing-intelligences each have a vested interest in overthrowing the powers-that-be in question.