[Cryptography] Updates on Durov charges in France

[Ray Dillinger]

> I had no idea! If NSA can crack Tor at will, how come so few people 
> using Tro get caught? Is it that they "save" this weapon for serious 
> cases only? And when it comes to the people who do got caught, usually 
> you read about them leaking their name or some kind of traceable 
> information somewhere, or that their web site has a bug or something, 
> but you never hear about NSA lending a helping hand.
>

Their attacks on Tor as far as I understand them are basically a mix of 
running Tor servers and timing/metadata attacks where they monitor ISP 
traffic for Tor's routing protocol.

While mass plaintext harvesting is believed to be hard, they have traced 
and tracked individual Tor users that rise to a sufficient level of 
interest to actually be worth human attention and dedicating/placing 
hardware for the case of an individual person of interest, and have a 
long history of extracting the plaintext of Tor messages when they seize 
hardware that's been used with it.

Note, foreign governments have done similar.  In some cases in China, 
etc, aside from whatever backdoors are built into various public 
infrastructure there, just observing that the Tor protocol is in use has 
apparently been enough to cause people to be arrested or worse.

Bear