[itdaniher]

Thanks for the link, which presumably contains the OC I'm about to reference.

We've seen several classified documents claiming (pick a three letter USG agency) have minimal operational ability to deanonymize a particular Tor user, and even less-so in real-time.

Fortunately, the FBI has proven it doesn't need to break Tor to interfere with the most egregious of the malactors who call it home. They've hijacked servers hosting objectionable content and used them to deliver Firefox exploits to leak real IP addresses.[1] They've done "good old fashioned police work" and exploited human trust [2] to bring down well coordinated teams of international players.

[1] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/09/playpen-story-fbis-unp... [2] https://www.wired.com/story/alphabay-takedown-dark-web-chaos...

[jerheinze]

In any case, using Tor is better than not. "We have plenty of academic research and mathematical proofs that tell us quite clearly that the more people use Tor, the better the privacy, anonymity, and traffic analysis resistance properties will become."

And in the examples you gave, a Qubes OS+Whonix setup would've prevented those exploits from leaking the IP, unless the adversary has a Xen exploit.