Originally published at: Law enforcement reports successful Tor deanonymizations
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The fact that they apparently have some sort of traffic timing analysis working; rather than the classic playpen-style ‘drop endpoint malware that cooperates with you outside of Tor’ definitely seems like an escalation in sophistication.
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Van Eck phreaking
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If German authorities can use co-operation with ISPs combined with basic shoe-leather and stake-out investigations against actual criminals, authoritarian regimes are no doubt doing the same against targeted political opponents.
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My favorite obscure implication of Van Eck is that Britain’s famously implausible "TV detector vans," which patrolled the streets and claimed to detect televisions tuned to channels that require the TV license payment to watch, could in fact have worked as precisely as claimed. They could even have used 50hz grid transients to forensically (rather than merely administratively) timestamp infractions.
This might then be a good example of a skeptic cliche (“TV vans are a hoax”) that while obviously right on procedural grounds, was not right on the technical or scientific grounds they care about. To whit: TV detector fans aren’t fake because they’re technically impossible, they’re fake because the British authorities are cheapskates and detecting oscillators in use is enough to intimidate people into confessions.
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