[fought4thots]

> Is their site really so sensitive as to make reading with Tor impossible?

Very much so, strange if people here don't understand that, even at the best of times APT's could be discovered down the track by their SO queries, now compare today, with heightened tensions and certain nuclear armed superpowers talking about going to war with each other.

How is this even slightly surprising? SO is vital shit, if you don't agree feel free to null route the site the next time you have a major incident at work :)

[yanmaani]

There are public dumps of all the questions and answers; you'd imagine that anyone paranoid enough simply runs a local mirror.

[jbentham]

Are you actually suggesting that SO/SE are blocking Tor because they intend to track all of their users by their IP addresses (or browser metadata), using national security as a justification?

I still do not understand how blocking Tor helps here. People who are concerned about their security will either use mirror sites, or use data dumps such as what is available at archive.org, or simply not use the SO/SE content at all. The number of users who will abandon Tor and the protection it provides for the express purpose of visiting SO/SE is negligible.

This move will not increase the number of persons who see SO/SE adverts or who are trackable by SO/SE. It will also not decrease the number of persons who will be able to access SO/SE content. So I continue to be mystified about the rationale behind this policy change.