There is a strong suspicion that the TOR network has been turned into a NSA honeypot by virtue of the NSA running more than half of the TOR exit nodes. Do you really want to take that chance?
Not to mention, pretty much the only thing most honest people use TOR for is to defeat geoblocking, and most geoblocked sites of any importance blacklist TOR exit nodes. So it’s not even that useful.
Evidence for your claims, please.
I said suspicion, not evidence. The suspicion arises when you try to answer the following 2 basic questions:
- Who wants to deanonymize TOR users the most?
- Who has the resources to run TOR servers and provide the service for free and why?
Or put another way, apart from a few idealists like the Calyx Institute, nobody in their right mind would foot the bill to run servers mostly used by hackers and pedos. Therefore, the most likely operators are law enforcement and nefarious barely-constitutional three-letter agencies.
Ok so the CIA, NSA, and FBI are running the majority of Tor nodes. Is there evidence that the data is being used to prosecute/harass/intimidate people?
Wouldn’t there be unusual IP addresses on exit nudes?
I’m just trying to follow this thread.
Is there evidence that the data is being used to prosecute/harass/intimidate people?
So you’re okay with the TLAs snooping around and watching what you do provided they don’t act on it? I’m not, if only as a matter of principle. To quote the great movie Anon, it’s not that I have something to hide, it’s that I have nothing I want them to see.
Besides, remember, this is the United States: just say terrorism or national security, and due process and habeas corpus go out the window - in which case, you may not hear about somebody being harassed or prosecuted at all.
Why wouldn’t they act on it?
Here’s a video referring to OPs opinion that the tor network is compromised.
Not proof, but reasonable explanation for why people believe this to be the case.
I typically don’t have the time to watch videos but I did in this case. It’s not wrong. The question is: what is your threat model?
First, Tor is not designed to protect you from a global passive adversary nevermind an active one. Global network probes can be used to identify individual sessions by traffic timing correlations. Locating hidden services is quite easy that way, since they’re sitting ducks. It is fairly easy to remotely compromise hidden service marketplaces for TLA players and/or use physical access to hardware and/or operators to make them cooperate with LEOs.
If you are trying to avoid ISP level snooping and blocking, advertisers, Google and national scale actors then Tor is the right tool to use. And by all means, do run your own relays to help the network. The more relays we have, the harder the attack.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/pvBAaUPzvBQ
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.
