Comment by valianteffort

“The western governments run most of the exits” is one of those things everybody “knows” but rarely backs up.

The list of all relays is public knowledge by design. There’s contact information attached to relays. The big operators are known individuals and organizations. They contribute. Interact.

Which ones are actually the governments doing bad things against their citizens? It’s hard to tell? Then why do you make such claims?

Relays that observably do bad things are removed from the network all the time. Are those ones the government? Tor seemingly has a reasonable handle on the situation if that’s the case.

If the fed is doing correlation attacks, why would they run relays at all? “Just” tap the IXPs near major hubs of relays. Or heck, get data from the taps you already had. Silent and more widespread.

Pushing people away from tor potentially makes it even easier to deanonymize them, depending on the adversary model assumed.

You'd be surprised how much crime goes on in plain sight. There are literally people on Instagram making stories of themselves showing off their drugs and stacks of money.

Given that a lot of law enforcement doesn't even bother with the low hanging crimes, the chance of them prosecuting anyone using Tor is extremely low unless you get big enough or go far enough to warrant the attention.

Please read the blog post:"It is important to note that Onion Services are only accessible from within the Tor network, which is why the discussion of exit nodes is irrelevant in this case."

This brings up a couple questions I've always had about Tor. I played around with it a bit maybe a decade ago and it seemed it was used for drugs, CSAM, and getting yourself honeypotted trying to buy illegal guns or murder-for-hire.

I always assumed if you were doing things where your threat model included governments trying to kill you that Tor wouldn't be all that useful even if it was secure.

Monitoring exit nodes does not necessarily reveal hidden services, though.

Edit: Never does, exit nodes are not part of the circuit, thanks to commenter below.

If they run just the exit node they still can’t de-anonymize you right?