All the competence in the world won't let you break basic crypto algorithms without at least breaking a sweat.
The playing field between Alice and Bob on the one hand and Eve on the other hand is inherently asymmetrical. Given equal competence and time to work on it, Alice and Bob are going to come up with an encryption scheme that Eve won't be able to break. You seem to be convinced that given almost unlimited resources, Eve can break any scheme Alice and Bob can come up with. I'm not sure I see any evidence for that.
In some cases, Eve is willing to arrest/maim/kill anyone caught using Bob's encryption scheme. Eve has the ability to control at least some of the intermediary systems. Eve doesn't need to specifically break the scheme, just be able to figure out who's using it so she can go apply some lead pipe cryptanalysis [0].
I don't think he's saying that at all. I interpreted it as, given unlimited resources, Eve can determine that Alice and Bob are communicating over encrypted channels which, for Alice and Bob, is almost as bad as having their encryption broken.
I took that to be a specific example -- Tor may be detected using traffic analysis -- of a more general principle -- circumvention tools can not hope to withstand nearly unlimited resources. I thought tptacek was pretty explicit in making this more general statement.
One thing that a lot of circumvention tool promoters get wrong is the threat model. The threat model isn't "attacker can read your traffic" --- although some of the best known circumvention tools have made cryptographic mistakes that did allow that. The threat model is "tractable attacks that isolate traffic using your tool from bulk Internet traffic".
A torture cell will do just peachy at decrypting the actual packets.
The playing field between Alice and Bob on the one hand and Eve on the other hand is inherently asymmetrical. Given equal competence and time to work on it, Alice and Bob are going to come up with an encryption scheme that Eve won't be able to break. You seem to be convinced that given almost unlimited resources, Eve can break any scheme Alice and Bob can come up with. I'm not sure I see any evidence for that.