Tor is a project funded by the United States Federal Government.
They have hired people affiliated by the Tor Project who know where the weaknesses are, to help them stockpile and weaponize vulnerabilities. It has even commissioned malware attacks against the computer of the Tor users.
Over 27.5% of the Tor Exit Nodes, which lead back to the public Internet, are owned by a single entity. (As of 2021.)
The security researcher who gave that figure says they suspect the same entity has at least 1-3% of the exit nodes on top of the 27.5% figure.
This would mean that almost 1 in 3 Tor Exit Nodes are owned by the same entity.
As of two years ago, 79% of all Tor Nodes (not just the Exit Nodes) were hosted in a 14 Eyes Alliance country. Countries whose intelligence agencies have spy on each other, and then pass around, to bypass domestic surveillance laws and the United States Constitution.
The Tor Browser itself is basically a modified version of Firefox. By default, it has all active content (JavaScripts, WASM executable support, media codecs, etc.) available and exposed to the Web, and no ad blocker.
They claim this is to make everyone look the same, but in reality it means thousands of security vulnerabilities from a Web browser that has a really lousy track record on that subject.
While facilitating a vandal on the TechRights IRC network, who is very clearly an unhinged person, and other crime, Tor doesn’t seem to attract a lot of legitimate usage.
But it’s designed as a trap.
It’s obviously not “anonymous” and certainly not if you use it like it comes and on top of some spyware OS like Windows or the Mac.
I would call the Tor Project itself almost something of a trap to lure users onto a compromised Web browser, and a network that has largely been hijacked at the Entry and Exit points by the same government that funds it. ⬆