This is among the most uninformed commentary regarding Tor that I have ever read. The author seems to understand nothing about the history of Tor, the usage of Tor, the technical design of Tor, Tor security research, encryption strategy, or the reception of Tor within the U.S. Government.

I can't even take umbrage with anything that's written here, because the author's basic factual axioms are simply wrong.

EDIT in Reply:

I started fact checking, and I couldn't past the first two paragraphs. It is a work of fiction that, if it occasionally flirts with the truth, does so almost certainly by chance.

Below is my rather unorganized beginning of a fact check:

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I would like to fact check the entirety, but I'm running short on time, so I'll skip his tin-foil hat pre-ramble:

>Tor became a prominent feature of political discourse around the world in 2013 when Edward Snowden popped up on the scene...

False. Tor rose to prominence far prior to leaks, particularly with the Arab Spring and the Silk Road. The first appearance on the front page of the NYT was in 2009 [0] A year prior to the leaks, Foreign Policy named Dingledine et al. to its Top 100 Global Thinkers list.[1] Snowden's sticker didn't start start that fire, although it might have added some fuel.

>I knew about some of the pit-falls and problems of Tor: I knew that if you signed into Google using Tor, it didn't really matter because Google still had all the information about your personal account. The same with Facebook. So Tor didn’t really solve the corporate side of surveillance.

>I knew about some of the pit-falls and problems of Tor: I knew that if you signed into Google using Tor, it didn't really matter because Google still had all the information about your personal account. The same with Facebook.

So Tor didn’t really solve the corporate side of surveillance.

So now, I have to ask. Has this guy just found a way to make a living getting stoned and spouting faux-anarchist nonsense?

Not signing into websites with your real name while on an anonymous service is the 1+1=2 of anonymity. So to remain anonymous, just... don't announce your name. That isn't a "pitfall." That's just common sense.

Around the point at which he was inventing grand conspiracies, particularly through close and perfect action of a monolithic government, I couldn't take it seriously any longer.

[0] http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/23/world/middleeast/23censor....

[1]http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2012/11/26/the_fp_100_...