The Tor teardown, brought to you by goats, giraffes, and Thor’s hammer

Remember how you used to be able to identify crazy people by how loudly they complained that the government was spying on everything they do? (Now we must rely on more subtle signs, like whether like they’ve been elected to Congress.)

Edward Snowden’s continuing revelations about the depth and breadth of NSA spying have totally ruined paranoia for me. No matter how wacky the allegation, I am forced to concede that it might well be true; we’ll just have to wait for the next set of PowerPoints to arrive.

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Today another set did, courtesy of the Washington Post and the Guardian. It seems the NSA has managed to partially crack Tor, the network set up to offer anonymity to Web surfers. Tor has long been used as a haven for political dissidents, journalists, and human rights workers who were afraid of having their online activities tracked by governments far more evil than our own.

By Tor’s — er, Thor’s hammer

Using a variety of programs with truly ridiculous names, the spooks have managed to track a number of alleged terrorists as they entered the Tor network, then departed. Per the Post:

In some cases, the NSA has succeeded in blocking access to the anonymous network, diverting Tor users to insecure channels. With a tool called Mjoliner — the name of the hammer used by Thor, the Norse god of thunder — it has been able to monitor and control the paths of communications that are supposed to be chosen randomly as they pass through Tor. Another operation, called Mullenize, can “stain” anonymous traffic as it enters the Tor network, enabling the NSA to identify users as it exits.

When Mjoliner and Mullenize failed to do the trick, the spooks turned to programs named EgotisticalGoat, EgotisticalGiraffe, and Erroneous Identity to exploit weaknesses in the Firefox browser that forms part of the free Tor Bundle to identify anonymous users. The British equivalent of the NSA, GCHQ, has its own batch of quaint code names, including Quantum, Epicfail, and Onionbreath.

The latest slide deck also makes reference to a program called Fink Different, without explaining what it does. Maybe that’s what the NSA uses to target anonymous Apple users.

Somewhere, in a dank windowless basement 27 floors underground taken from a scene in the movie “Brazil,” a nameless functionary is generating the names for these programs.

Getting our goats

The fact that the Snowden saga has reached new levels of absurdity would be highly amusing if it didn’t also have life-and-death implications for those who rely on Tor. Remember, the U.S. State Department trains foreign dissidents on how to use Tor to protect themselves.

If the NSA can pwn Tor, don’t you think the Iranians and Chinese can too? If they haven’t yet, they’ve just received a thorough primer on the topic.

Mind you, it’s not an easy problem to deal with. Any tool that can be used by the good guys can simultaneously be exploited by the bad guys; that includes guns, telephones, highways, and the Internet. In most of those cases, there are clearly understood restrictions on what (mostly benign) governments can do to subvert these items when necessary for the benefit of all.

But the NSA seems to operate under its own set of rules, with minimal if any oversight. And who’s to say where the spying stops? The FBI has already used these techniques to compromise Tor communications in an effort to hunt down black market websites and kiddie pornographers. It’s a very short leap from this to the cops assuming anyone who uses Tor must be doing something bad and is thus automatically a suspect.

In an essay in the Guardian, Bruce Schneier argues that the NSA needs to be a helluvalot more transparent about the activities of its various Goats and Giraffes. Why? Because that makes us all more secure. Per Schneier:

The NSA has two conflicting missions. Its eavesdropping mission has been getting all the headlines, but it also has a mission to protect US military and critical infrastructure communications from foreign attack….

But with the rise of mass-market computing and the Internet, the two missions have become interwoven. It becomes increasingly difficult to attack their systems and defend our systems, because everything is using the same systems: Microsoft Windows, Cisco routers, HTML, TCP/IP, iPhones, Intel chips, and so on. Finding a vulnerability — or creating one — and keeping it secret to attack the bad guys necessarily leaves the good guys more vulnerable.

Far better would be for the NSA to take those vulnerabilities back to the vendors to patch. Yes, it would make it harder to eavesdrop on the bad guys, but it would make everyone on the Internet safer.

By exploiting the weaknesses in Tor to fight terrorism, the NSA helps enable terrorist governments to identify, imprison, and murder their own people. That’s the most absurd thing of all.

Does NSA spying make you wary of using Tor? Post your soon-to-be-unencrypted thoughts below or email me: cringe@infoworld.com.

This article, “The Tor teardown, brought to you by goats, giraffes, and Thor’s hammer,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Follow the crazy twists and turns of the tech industry with Robert X. Cringely’s Notes from the Field blog, follow Cringely on Twitter, and subscribe to Cringely’s Notes from the Underground newsletter.