[ivmi]

>I would start by examining where all the major Tor exit nodes are, since that's likely where you would hide your heavy trafficked Tor hidden service, right beside a giant exit node to blend in with the other traffic. Feds already know this, this is probably how they caught Freedom Hosting.

You would not want to run a heavily used hidden service that you want to remain hidden right beside an exit node. That would be foolish.

[rdl]

I wouldn't want to run a long-lived service which attracted serious attention on an onion routed network. You could get some initial protection by terminating the onion frontend traffic on "tamper resistant, untraceable, throwaway nodes", and then backhaul (maybe via Tor?), to other servers, etc. The frontends would be able to do some local processing to maybe break up the traffic somewhat.

All of this kind of stuff would impair site reliability. IMO, if SR went down more often, I'd have a higher opinion of the paranoid exhibited by the admins. A highly reliable underground site is usually either 1) run by people who are going to get caught or 2) run by people who are doing the catching. There's I guess 3) run by really exceptional people who are doing it as a political statement -- generally unlikely, but in this case, possible.