But on a serious note, it's possible to transfer 2.6TB over Tor in small pieces (such as file by file or via torrent). Given the size, however, I'd suspect they mailed hard drives after establishing contact with journalists. Even on a fairly fast connection, 2.6TB would take quite a while...

Recently someone leaked enormous amount of docs (2.6 TiB) to the
journalists [1]. It's still hard to do such thing even over plain old
Internet. Highly possible that these docs were transfered on a physical
hard drive despite doing so is really *risky*.

Anyways, in the framework of anonymous whistleblowing, i.e. SecureDrop
and Tor specifically it's seems to be an interesting case. I'm wondering
about the following aspects:

    o   Even if we use exit mode/non-anonymous onions (RSOS)
        is such leaking reliable? The primary issue here
        is time of transmission. It's much longer than any
        time period we have in Tor.

    o   What is going to happen with the connection after
        the HS republishes its descriptor? Long after?
        [This one is probably fine if we are not using
         IPs, but...]

    o Most importantly, is transferring data on >1 TiB
        scale (or just transferring data for days) safe at
        all? At least the source should not change their
        location/RP/circuits. Or need to pack all this stuff
        into chunks and send them separately. It's not
        obvious how it can be done properly. So at what
        point the source should stop the transmission
        (size/time/etc)/change location or the guard/
        pick new RP?

--
[1] http://panamapapers.sueddeutsche.de/articles/56febff0a1bb8d3c3495adf4/
--
Happy hacking,
Ivan Markin
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