Don’t Let Facebook, or Any Tracker, Follow You on The Web

jayp, IMO pastly's response is inadequate and possibly dangerously misleading.

FWIW, I think your fears may be well founded, and thus it may make sense to hit "new identity", or even to reboot Tails after visiting a site likely to be surveilled, maybe implanted with NSA/FBI/CA malware. It is difficult to know, and the best answer on day n might be a bad answer on day n+1, so we all need to spend time reviewing what we think we know about who are enemies are and what their methods are.

Some key points I think we need to always bear in mind:

o technology alone cannot keep anyone safe,

o judgments about the safest course of action must always take account of the local and global political situation, including the best current information about plausible political and legal as well as technical threats,

o one of the most important lessons from the Snowden leaks is that, far from being too paranoid, most of us are probably insufficiently paranoid--- and yet, we need to somehow prevent paranoia from destroying our good judgment or causing us to fall into passive despair (which is exactly the state which governments of USA, RU, CN etc want to place their domestic dissidents, so our despair would be their victory),

o "backdoor" should be understood as referring not to "easily spotted" [sic] malicious modifications in the actual Tor code as published by TP, but in other elements involved in the interaction between Tor clients, Tor nodes, and the wider Internet environment, such as psuedorandom number generators, TLS, PKI certificates, "benign" CDNs, "benign" anti-DDOS platforms "protecting" (?) TP and other NGOs from attack, etc.,

o USIC and other well-funded implacable enemies of all peoples everywhere at all times have problems of their own, suggesting that the situation is not entirely hopeless for ordinary citizens: a combination of technological, political, and legal opposition might possibly save our societies from totalitarianism, nuclear war, environmental catastrophe, and genocide,

o our chances might not look good, but given the alternative (passively watching the long train of human history finally and in the end run itself right off the rails) we really have no alternative but to fight back against the bad governments (right now, that would be pretty much all governments) as hard as we can, in every way that we can.

A book well worth reading carefully, despite what I think is a slant against "the privacy community" which IMO sometimes causes the author to misread things and to fail to exercise good journalistic judgment:

Yasha Levine,
Surveillance Valley
Public Affairs, 2018

The most explosive charge he makes does not appear to be supported by tor-dev post cited in the footnote in the text, but Tor users should be impressed by how many of the claims he has been making for about the past two years (e.g. that Google is eager to become a permanent member of the Surveillance-Industrial Complex) have been borne out by subsequent developments.

Curiously, he entirely omits some of the most damaging allegations (supported by verifiable facts) about TP (before Shari Steele's directorship), made in submitted comments which this blog did not publish when they were submitted shortly before the JA debacle made worldwide headlines.

I think Tor users should try to read the book with an open mind. Rather than jumping to the conclusion that he must be an FSB agent (which I currently doubt) anxious to expose alleged CIA agents working in TP (such a charge would have a worrisome degree of factual truth in at least one instance of a coder who jumped from working for USIC under State Department cover to working for TP, and who was dismissed when this troubling item in his CV was revealed by none other than JA), I think readers should understand that Levine's hostility to USG's claim to be somehow "different" [sic] from other abusive quasi-colonial empire-building governments, to have some kind of "natural right" [sic] to global hegemony, is quite natural for anyone who has lived in Russia, and is not necessarily an undesirable POV for the privacy community, nor does criticism of USG policies imply uncritical support of Putin's policies.

The most damaging allegation in Levine's book may be his claims about an alleged email conversation between a Russian dissident (living in Russia) and Roger D.

Incidentally, Levine appears to have dropped out of view after the Drump admin closed the SF Consulate, a move which caused him to complain about the difficulties this creates for Russians who live part of the year on the West Coast. In his writings he says nothing about Putin's oppression, but I stress again that the simplest explanation for that is that anyone who wants to enter (or leave) RU without too much hassle is not in a good position to criticize the Putin regime.

Rather than denouncing Levine as a tool of Putin (a view for which I see no evidence whatsoever at this point), I think TP should swallow a bitter pill and consider embracing his criticisms and adopting the view that TP needs to recognize that

o most people who live outside the US are fairly hostile towards USG bullying/spying/death-droning/election-meddling etc etc etc,

o they are not wrong to oppose those things, vocally and bitterly,

o TP can and must oppose them to, vocally and bitterly,

o TP can't possibly do that effectively until it has secure funding not tied to USIC tied entities like SRI, or USG "soft power projection" entities like BBG

o the same for USIC corporate partners such as Google, Amazon, and maybe Fastly (the owner of the PKI cert which "authenticates" this very blog, a curious and troubling which TP keeps failing to explain).

As USG moves further and further towards Putin style authoritarianism, under the erratic (racist? psychopathic?) leadership of Drump, TP needs to realize that the paranoid mindset exemplified by Levine becomes more and more valid, not just for people living in RU, but also for people living in the USA.

It follows, I think, that it is time for TP and all key TP employees to leave the USA and try to find a safer home, perhaps in Germany, Norway, Finland, or Iceland. There appear to be no really good choices for a new home, but all signs suggest that USA is increasingly, like RU, an utterly inappropriate choice for a human rights group to call home. C.f. for example the latest USG attacks on "mainstream" US journalists, which appear to be following the RU example by moving towards criminal prosecution.

Anyone who isn't preparing to leave for some place which is not moving towards authoritarianism, must expect that authoritarianism will move into their neighborhood. If you work for a human rights organization, that means you will experience trouble like nothing you have ever experienced before.

First-party (cookie and other stuff) isolation to the URL domain (A.com has its own cookie jar, B.com has its own cookie jar, basically) also circuits are different so IP correlation is impossible by facebook) should be explicitly mentioned, it's a great contribution of the Tor Project to Internet privacy and firefox