Comment by sermah
16 hours ago
> so that no single party can link who you are to what you are doing
some single parties called government agencies pretty much can. it’s just much harder to do, so you’re safe from random people
16 hours ago
> so that no single party can link who you are to what you are doing
some single parties called government agencies pretty much can. it’s just much harder to do, so you’re safe from random people
we have been hearing this all the time whenever Dark Web is being discussed, but fact of the matter is that all the big darknet market busts have been done in past because of sloppy opsec by their operators and not some magical government wand which can pinpoint location of a hidden service
It's also a matter of whether it would be worthwhile to reveal the existence of such a capability in a given case.
If I were a government and had just spent a pretty penny on implementing the necessary infrastructure to defeat an encrypted routing scheme, I would probably not use that capability to bust internet drug dealers and other petty criminals, resulting in everyone scattering to a new scheme or to seek security through obscurity in some hand-rolled solution. I'd save it for national security level threats. High value targets.
Though thinking about it further, it would still be workable to gather compromising information on low-value targets without necessarily acting on it.
> It's also a matter of whether it would be worthwhile to reveal the existence of such a capability in a given case.
That would require many individuals to keep a juicy secret for a hypothetical future collective reward.