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I am novice to Tor, but before using it I have gone through lot of websites. An article explained that Tor is dangerous the following reason:

  1. Consider an IP 1.2.2.2 which was assigned by Tor to user X and he used it for an illegal activity then he closes his Tor circuit after accomplishing it,
  2. Later an innocent Y comes in and is assigned the same IP 1.2.2.2 by Tor,
  3. If user X is a government suspect and the IP he got at the time of doing illegal activity (1.2.2.2) was targeted by the NSA, what would happen to Y when Y retains that IP for a day? Could he be arrested by the NSA because of having 1.2.2.2 though he claim himself as innocent?

This lead the article's author to conclude that Tor is dangerous.

DJCrashdummy
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RaGa__M
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3 Answers3

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Regarding the question "Can you be arrested?", yes, you can be arrested all the time. In most countries you can be arrested for looking funny at a police officer. In most countries you will also be released as soon as they have no reason to suspect you anymore. Interesting questions would be would a prosecutor charge you and would those charges hold up in a court. But these are 1. questions for Law Stackexchange and 2. doesn't seem to be what you actually want to know. Your actual question seems to be How likely would it be that I am mistaken for a different Tor user?

Someone who is smart enough to deanonymize Tor users should be smart enough to have a basic understanding of how Tor works. Tor circuits only live for 10 minutes and many users share the same exit node. Deanonymizing a user which accesses service A and seeing that the same exit node also accessed service B is very weak evidence that both accesses came from the same user. When there are more than 10 minutes between both events, its practically no evidence at all.

Jobiwan
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Philipp
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There is no risk that you get mistaken for 'the previous user who used this IP address'. Tor is not something like DHCP. There is no mapping between 'users' and 'IP addresses'. At any given time, multiple clients all use the same exit node. Also, the government / the NSA know how Tor works. When they see suspicious traffic from an exit node, they know it can be from any Tor client around the world.

Jobiwan
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Later an innocent Y comes in ...

It all depends on which precise later we are talking about. According to the official manual, MaxCircuitDirtiness parameter is configured to 10 minutes by default. Also, given the fact Tor does not store your IP address, we can say Tor is not dangerous in the context you are describing.