On Mar 10, 2015 10:21 PM, "Risker" risker.wp@gmail.com wrote:
Thanks, Chris. But if the account is obviously not a normal account, I'd suspect that this special kind of user account would quickly become very obvious to those who snoop and would actually increase the level of scrutiny on the account, both internally and externally. I'm not really
all
that sure it's an overall improvement in safety.
Risker/Anne
That's going to depend on your threat model
If secret agents are watching you through binoculurs then nothing is going to save you.
If gov wants to track down all users who are "suspicious" (not very far fetched in the current political climate), then yes using tor may make you stand out. This is probably the case already for anyone using tor at all (esp. If not using a bridge if i understand things correctly)
If your use case is you want to upload pictures of a pro democracy protest in some fascist country where the pictures are likely to get you arrested, and fascist gov has a list of all ips accessing wikimedia servers for the specific time period, then tor might help you (emphasis on the maybe. If you are the only person in the country at that time using tor and they are able to detect your using tor then your dead. or if you are in the picture, or the rest of a long list of operational security details the paranoid have to deal with)
re kevin's comment about worth the risk
Whether or not its worth the risk is the perogative of the person taking the risk. Maybe they even consider whatever they are doing important enough that they would still do it even without the protection of tor if tor is not an option. Not that long ago thousands of people were taking "risks" by buying illicit drugs on the silk road using tor for protection. I find it easy to imagine that many people in repressive places would consider spreading information a much more neccesary risk than what silk road patrons thought was an acceptable risk in using that service.
Or perhaps tor users have nothing to hide and simply feel that what they do online is nobody's bussiness. Or maybe they want to increase the annonyminity pool for those who really do have legitament reason to hide.
--bawolff