Malware planted on the servers of Freedom Hosting : How did the FBI penetrated the supposedly anonymous TOR Network ?

 

In the  Administrations  own  words  cyber  attacks  against the  United  States  would  be  interpreted  as  a  declaration of   war. 

Are  we   then to  understand that   cyber  attacks  perpetrated  by the  United  States  against other  countries (Mostly  allies)  are  a  declaration of  war  as  well?

Are  we  also to  understand that  the United  States government (including those in  Congress  who legitimize the  Prism  program) have now  openly  declared  war  upon the  American  people with this  attack on the Tor Network being used  to escape  their snooping and  ever increasing  invasion of  privacy?

Are  we  not  to  use the  same  measure  that  they have  reserved  for  themselves  in the  name  of  National  Security?

How  long and  how  far  will  this  be allowed to  continue without  being  called into  question?

~Desert Rose~
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NSA's Cyber Army Attacks the Navy's Tor Network, Gives Spoils to the FBI

Dees Illustration

Eric Blair
Activist Post
It was reported earlier this week that the FBI won a great victory by stopping the largest child porn distributor on the Internet. The FBI's victory lap was cut short when some of the details of how they did it were more closely examined.
What the FBI actually did was seize a hosting service on the hidden TOR Network.  The owner of the hosting service Freedom Hosting was not directly involved in the production or distribution of child porn, he just provided anonymous hosting used by pedophile pornographers.
The bigger question became how the FBI penetrated the supposedly anonymous TOR Network. That's where the story gets interesting.
TOR, short for The Onion Router, was originally developed by the Navy Research Laboratory to provide an anonymous secondary internetwork for the government to use.  Supposedly the project was abandoned by the Navy only to be picked up by open-source volunteers who now run the Tor Project.
Despite its beginnings as a government project, most believe TOR to be the best current option for online anonymity.  But does this recent compromise of TOR reveal that it's also part of the surveillance grid?  The long answer is complicated, but the short answer is no.
First, the NSA has been identified as the source of the malware bomb used to take down Freedom Hosting - not the FBI who claimed victory in the investigation and apprehension.
Arstechnica writes:

Malware planted on the servers of Freedom Hosting—the "hidden service" hosting provider on the Tor anonymized network brought down late last week—may have de-anonymized visitors to the sites running on that service. This issue could send identifying information about site visitors to an Internet Protocol address that was hard-coded into the script the malware injected into browsers. And it appears the IP address in question belongs to the National Security Agency (NSA).

Read More Here

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