[TheLoneWolfling]

Untrue. An (for example) ISP could very easily determine if you were an originator simply by if someone relayed it to you.

Similarly, a Sybil attack can probabilistically figure out the originator, simply be seeing which peer first relayed the communication.

[Groxx]

This is about what I was thinking. Tor avoids some of the ISP-problems by re-encrypting at every step (so you can't correlate input and output, except by time/size, which is hard on a busy node).

After poking through the FAQ the claim softens quite a bit, into that "normal" users can't detect such things. This I'll grant is true. And they even mention that, if hiding from adversaries who can observe lots of traffic, you should probably use Tor.

That said, the FAQ does say:

>However if one entity is capable of recording the entire internet traffic, he will probably be able to at least statistically sort out where you are connecting from (your IP address).

which I think I'll still disagree with, unless this is provided by DHT (I don't know DHT, sadly. I'll remedy this some day). Unless you run through Tor, it seems(?) like all messages are essentially plaintext across the internet, so they would know exactly where a message originated, if you're within their view.