All the recent dark net arrests seem to be pretty vague on how the big bad was caught (except the IM admin’s silly opsec errors) In the article they say he clicked on a honeypot link, but how was his ip or any other identifier identified, why didnt tor protect him.
Obviously this guy in question was a pedophile and an active danger, but recently in my country a state passed a law that can get you arrested if you post anything the government doesnt like, so these tools are important and need to be bulletproof.
This question gets asked every year and every time it turns out to be an OPSEC mistake instead
And hopefully will continue to be asked, because one day it may not be poor OPSEC.
Hopefully it will be asked by the very smart people who actually develop TOR, and not just paranoid Internet randos like OP.
Honestly i believe there is no point in speculating whether there are backdoors installed in popular privacy and encryption apps; for all we know, the powers that are may already have a digital fortress’esque quantum computer decrypting everything from your signal messages to onion sites in a matter of seconds.
I think(my personal headcanon) that there probably was a Manhattan project like top secret research project that has yielded some very fruitful results, now i guess we have to just wait for some whistleblower or a disgruntled employee to feed it a file that blows it up.
Well OPSEC is the stated cause. Who knows how the person was initially identified and tracked. For all we know he was quickly identified through some sort of Tor backdoor that the feds have figured out, but they used that to watch for an unrelated OPSEC mistake they could take advantage of. That way the Tor backdoor remains protected.
