Hypothetically if the machines were not rendered inoperable - either physically or by a remote 'kill switch' how self-sufficient could an operator be without support of ASML or TSMC personnel?
This is all very interesting. No disrespect to Mullvad but will there be any effort towards attempting to get such functionality standardized? In the past there was a XOR scrambling patch for OpenVPN[1] to attempt to circumvent certain government firewalls and the OpenVPN developers had concerns about unaudited changes to the wire protocol.
These are pretty serious allegations, and as the ex-CIO of PIA, you certainly have the credibility to make them. However, drip-feeding various circumstantial links do not really help your case, and HN comments is not the best medium to make them.
I'd suggest creating a website or page, and writing out your allegations in detail and instead linking that here.
Considering past events such as this.[1] I think it is more likely that the F.B.I are aware of TAILS and its limitations against certain adversaries and choose not to comment.
Every single major intelligence organization will send people to Def Con. They'd probably won't advertise who they work for, but most years there's a "spot the fed" contest where if someone is informally confirmed by those near them, they get a free t-shirt. I'd assume every agency knows every mainstream tool. I find the contrast between an NSA presentation at Def Con 26 and the CIA not having any documents about Gentoo Linux pretty funny. It's surprising to me because ChromeOS is built on Gentoo.
While supporting funding more nodes is a noble goal another concern I consider overlooked is the potential 'centralisation' of nodes e.g how a large number of Tor nodes are hosted in Germany and near countries and the implications for network surveillance.
Might recall reading something to the effect of the C Tor daemon having run into bottlenecks due to lack of multi-threading of certain components and general concern over safety footguns.
There are allegations that Satoshi may have accidentally slipped up and leaked IP address that was not a Tor exit-node or other anonymous-proxy.
Could either be Satoshi fucking up and not using Tor all the time (has happened to other 'anonymous' entities) or perhaps they needed a clearnet connection for some reason and managed to use another internet connection not attached to any identifiers that would lead back to them despite that.
