I've heard a lot of people on the left argue that Tor is likely backdoored because it was created by the U.S. Navy for spies to communicate and is still funded by the government. Yasha Levine has written a lot about this:
- https://surveillancevalley.com/blog/tor-files
- https://thebaffler.com/salvos/the-crypto-keepers-levine
He also appeared in TrueAnon episode 50 to talk about this.
On the other hand, a lot of people in the crypto and tech community disagree with this. They believe that Tor is not backdoored for one or both of the following reasons:
- Tor is open-source and has been audited.
- The U.S. Government would never do such a thing.
They also point to a leaked NSA presentation from 2007 that admits the NSA can't deanonymize Tor users.
What are your thoughts?
I don't think that it is fully "backdoored", personally, but if you look into the case of that dread pirate roberts guy, it is plain to see that they can get you if they are willing to pay the resources to do so. I assume the resource cost (e.g. paying multiple salaries to analysts, hosting a ton of TOR nodes) is pretty steep though. Edit: so from other comments I am seeing that dpr got got because he was a dumb-dumb. Still they had to pay spooks (most likely) to sift through intel to find him, so take from that what you may.