Just because something is illegal in certain jurisdictions it doesn't make whatever no longer decentralized. If running tor nodes was illegal, it wouldn't mean the tor is centralized.
Does operating a Tor node preclude someone from being investigated? I should hope not. Just because they do operate a node doesn't mean that a given household is free from criminal activity.
I can’t remember the name of one of those famous cases of people that got arrested for thinking that they could use TOR to break the law without punishment, but there’s been so many by now that I honestly don’t feel bad having forgotten. No doubt someone else does - Russ something, maybe? No doubt there’ll be some sort of “but it’s decentralized” reply and, yeah, it’s decentralized, but that doesn’t mean it’s necessarily untraceable. Bitcoin isn’t the sort of thing that’s worth betting my freedom on. YMMV.
Yep. Once Tor is integrated and people start using it for darknet-type activities, it won't be possible to hold anyone accountable or to shut it down. It's decentralized. Personally I find the implications pretty fascinating.
How is that in any way conflicting with what I wrote? Of course the servers need maintenance and all of that - Tor is what allows the people doing that maintenance and funding to stay outside the reach of law enforcement even if they are on US soil.
They do in that the organizations involved clearly dissociate themselves from running critical operational infrastructure, or getting involved with the potentially-illegal activities enabled by their tools.
If Tor Project ran a large number of Tor nodes directly, they'd be open to very simple legal attacks.
Tools that have both legal and illegal uses have a lot more latitude. Consider TOR was funded by the US government in the first place; they clearly had non-criminal intent in mind.
It's hard to picture a 'legal' use for something that is tied to a proprietary API.
One thing I'm curious about Tor: What are the incentives for running a node?
If there are no monetary incentives, then how does it achieves decentralization? Also, what stops a malicious actor with enough resources (a government) from controlling a big portion of the network?
Are you suggesting that nobody (companies or individuals) in the US or five eyes countries should run TOR nodes since the government can slap them with a court order?
Once again, it's a completely separate issue. You can have a centralized service that also uses an open protocol that people can make custom clients for. Furthermore, people use stuff like Tor for anonymity with decentralized systems. Trusting a central system to keep your information private is a risk of itself.
Well, Tor is used ONLY for criminal activities. That's its entire point. You're in a state where talking to the Americans is a criminal activity punishable by beheading. So you use Tor to talk to them. I'm almost certain that activities which are criminal in the USA outnumber activities which are criminal in some oppressive regime on the Tor network. That's only because it's a damn good and secure network and we have less people standing against oppressive regimes than we have ones standing against USA law.
You can't have a really secure anonymous untraceable network, but also monitor everyone on it for illegal activity. The entire point of that network is illegal activity, for local definitions of illegal.
If someone controls your entrance and exit nodes they read your traffic. A substantial enough minority of network nodes have always been controlled by the government that Tor is not and has never been anything other than a massive sting operation.
The flipside of that is that it's reasonable to assume that most (not government run) TOR nodes are run at hosters offering cheap small VPS with cheap traffic and high bandwidth. That gives a few select datacenters where sniffing and correlating network traffic is extremely beneficial for deanonymizing TOR traffic. And if the datacenter operator doesn't cooperate and isn't vulnerable to covert sniffing there are always their uplink providers.
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