Possible upcoming attempts to disable the Tor network

Following up on Roger's remark

"And as for your 'why', that's an excellent question, and one we've been wrestling with too. There are nine directory authorities, spread around the US and Europe. If they're trying to hunt down particular Tor users, most possible attacks on directory authorities would be unproductive, since those relays don't know anything about what particular Tor users are doing."

Here is an attempted summary of informed speculation about who might be planning to attack us, and why:

* Only USG is capable to attempting to seize 4 or more DA nodes,

* A collaboration between USG and EU governments would be particularly dangerous for Tor,

* Such a scenario is not implausible; according to The Intercept's sources, Belgium seems to be permitting NSA spying on Belgacom to continue with only token hindrance, and Germany's efforts to reduce NSA spying on Germans also seems to be halfhearted (some would suggest that the proper word for such passive collaboration is "treason"),

* Within USG, Snowden leaks confirm that at least until recently, the majority view in NSA/CIA was that killing Tor would be counterproductive to their self-defined mission, which implies that the threat most likely comes from DOJ/FBI, unless NSA/CIA have revised their attitude toward Tor,

* There is no known *plausible* rational reason for USIC to capture DAs other than to try to bring down the Tor network entirely,

* In principle, NSA (or even DOJ/FBI) might try to replace genuine Tor with a fake version in order to pursue deanonymization of Tor users whom they believe pose a threat to USIC, or to US "strategic interests", but it seems doubtful that would be effective for more than a few hours,

* In the current political context their immediate motivation for taking down Tor entirely might be

(i) FBI might be attempting a direct (and fantastically foolish) experiment seeking to find out whether the most dangerous attacks on Western banking infrastructure suddenly fall off when the Tor network is brought down; if so, the world can see how they rate the respective value of the lives of overseas USG personnel and other persons who will be endangered if Tor is brought down, versus the value of Wall Street derivatives,

(ii) NSA might perhaps be attempting a "real world" experiment seeking to verify their ability (well practiced in "cyberranges") to shut down parts of the global internet,

(iii) In principle, NSA might want to take over Tor network to employ it as a global botnet in a retaliatory cyberattack, but this seems highly implausible since they already have several other botnets with much larger net bandwidth (this is confirmed in detail by multiple Snowden leaks),

(iv) Perhaps the least implausible rationale for NSA/CIA trying to take down Tor entirely might be that someone in NSA/CIA thinks this might force some HVT in some (newly or secretly declared?) war zone to use non-Tor lines of communication, possibly rendering said HVT susceptible to a targeted drone strike; among the likely targets would be

(a) ISIL leadership

(b) Boko Haram leadership

(c) (possibly) unnamed major drug traffickers

(d) (very unlikely, one hopes) unnamed torrenteers whose continued existence is repugnant to MPAA

* There may (also?) be some connection with

(i) intense political pressure on FBI to rapidly uncover some "smoking gun" fingering DPRK for the Sony cyberattack, which so far they have clearly been unable to do (but watch out for attempts to invent evidence should none be obtainable through honest detective work),

(ii) the recent cyberattack on a German steel mill, which appears to be one of less than five known cyberattacks to date which have caused extensive physical damage (the first being the US/Israel Stuxnet attack on Iranian nuclear enrichment plants; many might assume some other actor must be responsible for the attack on the steel plant, but that would underestimate the nastiness of USIC leadership which is probably seeking ways to remind Angela Merkel of what they can do the nation she governs if Germany ceases cooperating with USIC),

(iii) increasing hysteria in CIA and NSA aroused by the possibility (likelihood?) that some of their personnel may face prosecution in the EU for war crimes, resulting from multiple criminal acts including kidnapping, torture, and assassination,

(iv) increasing hysteria among US/UK police commands that assassinations of police officers might become a "new normal" (no-one seems to be keeping statistics, but my impression is that what numbers are available suggest that someone like Mr. Bratton would do very well to emulate our own leader by keeping his cool),

(v) recurrent hysteria inside various governments regarding Wikileaks (which has just published new documents leaked from CIA),

(vi) growing fear in certain USG circles of a literal revolution in the US; most observers seem to assess this possibility as unlikely, but they are clearly not taking global financial instability into account, and recent US Army manuals do seem to announce that the US Army general staff expects to occupy major cities (New York City is on their list of targets) during the coming decade, and is thinking hard about how they might try to control an urban population of millions with a military force numbering in the tens of thousands,

(vii) announcements in the press that US/UK/EU are planning another large scale seizure related to supposed child pornography rings; all well informed observers seem to agree that such announcements are very likely nothing but a laughably transparent "smoke screen" attempting to distract public attention from the real motivation for attacking Tor, but these announcements have in the past proven a reliable harbinger of the seizure of Tor nodes,

* When attempting to identify possible "rational" motivations for USG attempting to take down the Tor network entirely, we must bear in mind the all too plausible possibility that they have no idea what they are doing; some Snowden leaks show clear evidence that as recently as 2011, NSA leadership suffered from a seriously flawed understanding of key technical features of Tor; there is plenty of recent historical evidence suggesting that technical (or political) misconceptions might very well play a decisive role in USG "strategic planning" for eternal global cyberwarfare,

* The possibility cannot be discounted that the USIC leadership, frightened by the prospect of their own prosecution for war crimes, is simply lashing out with irrational ferocity.