The Tor Project has insisted that its privacy-preserving powers remain potent, countering German reports that user anonymity on its network can be and has been compromised by police.
You SHOULD ask the police about this!
A report by German news magazine Panorama and YouTube's investigative journalism channel STRG_F claims that the German Federal Criminal Police (BKA) and the public prosecutor's office in Frankfurt am Main were able to identify at least one Tor user after conducting network surveillance.
The report cites "time analysis" as the key to identifying Tor users. "Timing of individual data packets, anonymized connections can be traced back to the Tor user, even though data connections in the Tor network are encrypted multiple times," the report says – unfortunately without explaining how the technology works.
Tor offers enhanced anonymity to users of its network by routing their traffic through a so-called dark web of nodes so that the true origin of a connection is obscured. Traffic sent to Tor is wrapped in layers of encryption and first reaches an "entrance" or "guard" node. The traffic then bounces through at least three randomly selected servers – aka "relays" – before returning to public networks via an "exit node" or connecting to an .onion service. That process hides the source of a connection and makes it harder to observe what a particular user is doing online just from their network traffic.
