If someone makes disposable Raspberry Pi Tor exit and non-exit nodes sealed in hard plastic resin, we could all buy them and drop them off in random places throughout the world on open networks. If enough people the world over does this, we would make it a lot harder for a global passive attacker to succeed.
Tor's biggest vulnerability is the risk associated with operating exit nodes means that the number of exit nodes remains relatively low at ~1000 worldwide. If hundreds of thousands of exit nodes started popping up all over the globe. It would be very hard to counter.
I'm also curious if enough governments unhappy with what is happening could go as far as hosting many tor nodes outside the control of the NSA. Is the Global Passive Adversary threat still valid if there are many of them that are non-cooperative with one another (i.e. China can't monitor US and Russian tor nodes, Russia can't monitor US and Chinese nodes, and the US can't monitor Chinese and Russian nodes)? My intuition tells me that the global passive adversary would have to be able to monitor most of the nodes, but if others came on the scene doing the same, they would dilute the percentage of nodes that any single global passive adversary could monitor.
Tor's biggest vulnerability is the risk associated with operating exit nodes means that the number of exit nodes remains relatively low at ~1000 worldwide. If hundreds of thousands of exit nodes started popping up all over the globe. It would be very hard to counter.
I'm also curious if enough governments unhappy with what is happening could go as far as hosting many tor nodes outside the control of the NSA. Is the Global Passive Adversary threat still valid if there are many of them that are non-cooperative with one another (i.e. China can't monitor US and Russian tor nodes, Russia can't monitor US and Chinese nodes, and the US can't monitor Chinese and Russian nodes)? My intuition tells me that the global passive adversary would have to be able to monitor most of the nodes, but if others came on the scene doing the same, they would dilute the percentage of nodes that any single global passive adversary could monitor.