[heartsucker]

Funded by the government != The government has their hands all over it

[mattnewton]

Exactly, the government is extremely large and not all the NSA. Sometimes the left hand doesn't know what all the thousands of right hands are doing and can't possibly care.

[caf]

To some extent that's even true within the NSA.

[duxup]

The internet is a government conspiracy!

[zdkl]

The government is a government conspiracy!

...wait.

[aeorgnoieang]

There's a crazy logic to this that I appreciate.

[gambiting]

Even TOR was originally a government funded project

[aluhut]

Even "the Internet" was originally a government funded project

[akerro]

and yeah, currently Internet is a spying tool of USA.

[idlewords]

It's a spying tool for American corporations far more than it is one for the government.

[CaptSpify]

It's a spying tool for American corporations which is very convenient for the government

[frostymarvelous]

And TOR is no longer (was it before, I don't know) a secure tool.

[openasocket]

It still gets a large portion of its funding from the USG

[sndean]

And there's lots of Tor posters hung up at USG labs (e.g., https://www.torservers.net/wiki/_media/tor-relay-poster.resi...). I was pretty surprised, at first

[openasocket]

Tor has probably saved more than a few CIA agents' lives, not to mention free access to the Internet being a powerful tool for undermining authoritarian regimes.

[WillyOnWheels]

> Tor has probably saved more than a few CIA agents' lives

Tor's main purpose is to allow agents of US intelligence agencies to communicate back with the home base.

"Giving free access to the Internet being a powerful tool for undermining authoritarian regimes" makes it harder for an adversary to focus solely on intelligence agency agent traffic.

I'm not saying Tor is backdoored or monitored, though it's heavily monitored.

When enjoying the benefits of Tor, it's wise to also remember Tor's main purpose.