Comment by keepamovin
Comment by keepamovin 15 hours ago
What you’re claiming is not necessarily correct, but it’s an avenue of interesting speculation. Nevertheless, let’s clarify a few of your possible misunderstandings or points of confusion:
I’m not saying TOR is weak, nor that the reason for its concealment is to project a false sense of government strength.
What I am saying—and what you seem to have misunderstood—is that the TOR network is most likely used, precisely because of its strength, for highly sensitive clandestine operations. This results in blanket classification of all involved identities, making them inaccessible to law enforcement. Law enforcement likely understands this, which is why they don’t pursue it—knowing it’s a dead end. Instead, they rely on side-channel effects or mistakes made by criminals.
To my mind, this explains the public information we see.
Now that I’ve clarified, what do you think?
> What I am saying—and what you seem to have misunderstood—is that the TOR network is most likely used, precisely because of its strength, for highly sensitive clandestine operations.
Tor seems to be a poster child of the "Nobody But Us"[1] principle the NSA likes so much: it's strong when used by American spooks, but weak when used against them. If a country developed body armor that's impervious to all rounds except their own special alloy rounds, their use and promotion of that armor is not evidence of its utter robustness.
I don't doubt a lot of darknet busts involve a lot of parallel construction - the intelligence community doesn't have to give detailed logs; summaries are enough (IP addresses, dates and times). This is before considering that the FBI is involved in both (counter) intelligence and law environment.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NOBUS