Theoretically, one important point in favour of tor is as the traffic is routed from server to server each node only sees one sender and one recipient. Some servers keep a log, some servers to do not keep a log. The one big advantage for tor over a proprietary network is that in a proprietary network all the nodes are known, use some what more complex security protocols, but in the end are still known and tangible and theoretically a log can be created linking the actual user to the content accessed or sent. In a network like tor that chain may not exist and the system tends closer to being theoretically more anonymous.

I think Rodmar makes the important distinction between being secure and being anonymous. A piece of information or communication can have different meaning depending on the source and the recipient.

In fairness on Tor’s website it does not paper over these issues and in fact distinctly gives the example of transferring information which is important regardless of context and information which becomes sensitive only because of context and generally advises against using the network for content which is absolutely, rather than relatively, sensitive.

The users who still use the network for such content tend to fall in two categories one who do not understand the distinction and the other who are relying on security in obscurity.

As far as user information is concerned it does not make sense using Tor if one only wants to access his/her email (unless the person is accessing it from a geographical location where direct access is not possible). One can use it to access anonymous or off the record accounts and keep such access private and without a tangible connection with the end user.

For the users who are relying on obscurity one good work around would be to periodically switch networks and use new identities if they are transmitting sensitive information. That way even if one of the nodes is performing traffic analysis, it will receive incomplete information and considering the alternative, the damage will be lesser for the end user.

Traffic analysis is something which can be performed in any setting. On a public network like Tor one only has to focus on the analysis. On a private secure network, one has to solve the problem of cryptography and the traffic analysis.

The wikileaks case was a rather simple task where all they had to do was route traffic and look for keywords in the data being transmitted. From the perspective of intelligence it was more of a scattershot and they were looking for something, anything which is of value. Although if the users were using a private network, wikileaks would have to know what they were looking for and the network which the users were using, who was using it, trace the data through the various nodes all the while breaking the cryptography at each point as servers in such networks tend to use different algorithms and finally look at the data. Both the tasks are equally tedious computationally. So if someone is monitoring a specific individual a private network would be less anonymous that a public one as given the absence of logs there would always be culpable deniability while using the public ones. Rather it would not be anonymous at all and the only thing standing between the intruder and the information linked to the user is the encryption.

Any intelligence gathering exercise would have four categories
1. Known user, known nature of data.
2. Known user unknown nature of data.
3. Unknown user known nature of data.
4. Unknown user and unknown nature of data.

There will also be variation of the data being context specific or not.

If the information is context and user specific then tor is a very good alternative. But

In fairness it would be relatively easier to do what wikileaks did and something like that would be more difficult on a public network. But again, even in the bust up Tor succeeded in retaining the anonymity of the actual users who were transferring the information and given the absence of logs at nodes it can never be traced using only data mining and will have be solved in the good old fashioned way.

In the end as I always believe, it is a knife one can cut a fruit one can cut another person, the knife does not change. The context does.

Anon