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Comment by bearbearbear | Hacker News Reader

Tor is basically a funnel into the DOJ and has been for quite some time:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/03/doj-drops-case-a...

They run massive PR campaigns with carefully structured press releases designed to convince the kind of people they want to detain that TOR is private and safe for any kind of activity.

Because of this people tend to get swole when you suggest that TOR is not any good for protecting your privacy because lots and lots of people have been arrested, tried and convicted after trying to use it to hide elicit activities.

The US government has made millions of dollars of investment into TOR:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jul/29/us-govern...

Pretty much every time the US government is investing in something you can be certain that their intention is not to help you out.

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AFAICT, in all current cases it isn't Tor itself that's been broken by the authorities. It's the client end that has been compromised; and in a way that isn't specific to Tor. Had these users been using a VPN without Tor, they could have been compromised in largely similar ways.

Please, find me a counter-example - because I haven't seen one.

Admittedly, one thing that has happened is that the authorities are able to target compromises in the Tor Browser specifically, rather than in a wider range of clients that non-Tor VPN users might use. But they're probably more vulnerable than the Tor Browser is anyway.

It's important to consider here that the average person using TOR is not a network administrator.

And that they'll follow the instructions that come with the TOR browser and assume that it's safe.

So when I say that TOR isn't safe, I mean that it isn't safe as it's presented.

Saying that TOR isn't safe if you know what you're doing is like selling someone a car with no seatbelts and then telling them well if you knew what you were doing you'd install seat belts yourself and then the car would be safe.

> So when I say that TOR isn't safe, I mean that it isn't safe as it's presented.

Sure. But it is no more dangerous to use Tor on its own than it is to use a VPN privacy service on its own. So your claim that the US Government is enticing people into using Tor to entrap them is nothing more than an unsubstantiated conspiracy theory. It would be easier for governments if criminals didn't use Tor.

Chrome is arguably more 'secure' than the ESR Firefox that the Tor Browser is running on. If you are realistically concerned about this type of targeted attack, you should probably be browsing with Chrome isolated inside of Qubes/Whonix.

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