[nullflow]

  the chassis of the servers was opened and an unknown USB device was plugged in only 30-60 seconds before the connection was broken.

In which country did this happen?

As an European I expected the US/EU governments would keep their hands of Tor because dissidents use it in countries where US/EU want regime change.

[redthrowaway]

The USG is not a monolithic entity. The State Department loves TOR, for the reasons you list, while Justice hates it. The Justice Department does not need State approval to get warrants and take down servers, nor do they need State approval to work with their foreign partners to do the same.

[mpyne]

One of my favorite examples of this: http://articles.latimes.com/1989-06-07/news/mn-1711_1_rocky-...

[tw04]

The US/EU governments run their own nodes. Why WOULDN'T they take down third parties that aren't willing to give them the access they need to sniff traffic? Their support of dissidents in other countries doesn't require private nodes to exist.

[spacefight]

Which nodes are gov run?

[tankenmate]

Nederlands

$ whois 77.95.229.11

[SchizoDuckie]

WTF?! Since when do we backdoor hardware in The Netherlands without informing the owner?

[EarthLaunch]

It's not less possible, you're just more ignorant of it than America is.

[Havoc]

I'm sure even the Netherlands has some kind of mechanism in place to allow this if a sufficiently powerful court order is in place.

[tinco]

Feel free to drop the 'even' in that sentence. Just say the magic words 'child pornography' and the judge will go and install that bug himself. Tor has a very bad reputation in The Netherlands, I think just saying it's a Tor node might be enough reason for a judge to sign off on an eaves-dropping warrant.

[anigbrowl]

Hold off on the conclusion-jumping = 'possibly consistent with X' is a long way from 'proof of X'.

[rtpg]

Even on a more practical level, aren't all major hosting providers ones that follow standards where getting a USB drive onto a server would be extremely easy to trace back? Where was this guy keeping his servers?