If you are an insurgent communicating with your comrades, the moment your government sees that you visit some suspicious sites, they will simply get a warrant (or not), get in your house, and use a $5 wrench on you till you start spewing names or cooperate with them and help them catch the rest of your comrades. I don't think they'll just keep watching your connection silently.

In other words most governments would prefer to peek once per day into each tor circuit than having the ability to constantly monitor a specific subset of all circuits. The former would practically make Tor useless since anyone running a few guard nodes and a few exit nodes would be able create a graph of users and the sites they visit through Tor.

In most cases, there is no way to get "a little" f'ed up unless we are talking about sharing MP3s over Tor.

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On Sun, Feb 3, 2013 at 5:08 PM, Roman Mamedov <rm@romanrm.ru> wrote:
On Sun, 3 Feb 2013 16:53:21 +0200
Konstantinos Asimakis <inshame@gmail.com> wrote:

> that someone peeks constantly into your circuits (well 1/3rd of them) for a
> long time, which is not really worse than peeking for a day into them.

Observing for a long period allows to build some profile on the user, observing
for a short time is much more harmless. To continue quoting for you from
tor-talk, "...to me it just seems to be an elaborate trade off that results in
"if you are f***ed, ensure you are f***ed as completely as possible and with
the most dire consequences possible".

"An adversary has a chance to see some of my entry traffic for some time"

...seems rather harmless to me compared to the Guards system's of:

"an adversary has a chance to see ALL of my entry traffic for a long period"

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With respect,
Roman