>>8395
TOR is a honeypot. 70%+ of TOR nodes are under control of the NSA. This is a feature, not a bug. TOR was created in the first place so that "dissidents" (read: CIA assets) in Russia, China, and Iran could do their work and evade getting caught by the local secret police. For anyone else, it's waving a giant flag that says "HEY LOOK AT ME I LIKE CP," "HEY LOOK AT ME I DON'T LIKE THE GOVERNMENT AND I'M PROBABLY SOME KIND OF MILITIA EXTREMIST," etc.
See also, "supercookies."
https://www.itpro.com/security/privacy/358637/what-are-supercookies You've maybe heard the term "cookies," right? It started out as a persistent text file stored locally that your browser would use for things like individual site settings. That goes back to the dialup days. Very quickly people whose stock in trade is gathering information about you (marketing departments, spammers, etc.) decided they really liked the idea of storing personal information about you locally, on your own computer, in files either hidden or with non-obvious names, made as obscure as possible and as difficult to remove as possible. Adobe got into this with secret spaces for additional hidden cookies files in the cache folders used by Flash. Got all that?
"Supercookies" are not stored on your computer. They are information that your ISP has about you, like your real full name and your billing address, your IP addresses, full traffic logs, and they are available to marketers. They are also available to the glowbois, for free, just for the asking, no warrant required. The government has investigated itself and determined that there is no wrongdoing here. Theoretically you have a right to opt out of the selling-to-marketers part, but every ISP buries this a hundred screens deep in the terms of service so that you'll scroll past it. In 2016 Verizon got their peepee slapped with a pocket-change fine for selling people's "supercookie" information after they'd opted out. It cost them about a week's worth of that particular revenue.
What I am saying here is that there is no anonymity on the Internet. That went away when dialup went away. Every other week there's a news story about another series of 2am US Marshals' Service SWAT team raids on guys who thought TOR made them invisible, for "CP" or "dangerous extremism" or maybe the warrant says the guy shot President McKinley. If one Federal judge won't sign off on it, another will.
Legally speaking, US courts have found that you have no expectation of privacy when you use the Internet.
Look up Projects CARNIVORE, MYSTIC, BULLRUN, PINWALE, RAMPART-A, ECHELON, XKEYSCORE, FAIRVIEW, DISHFIRE, PREFER, and PRISM if you don't believe me. Do you think that there is more Internet traffic in the US than they can analyze? Go look up Project SENTIENT. ChatGPT is quaint. They had AI tools parsing Internet traffic to find patterns and actionable intelligence 10+ years ago. Look up "automatic inferencing." This shit's on Wikipedia now, for fuck's sake, so there's no excuse for saying "I didn't know." The NSA is looking over all our shoulders as we type, geolocating us from second to second, parsing every sentence for "actionable intelligence." The Russians, Chinese, and North Koreans are rank amateurs when it comes to spying on their own people, at least from a technical perspective.
The tl;dr here is, you aren't hidden. TOR is compromised by design. Any VPN traffic is still going to get logged by your ISP in real time. The takeaway is that each man is responsible to his own conscience, but never forget that you're under the microscope every second. If you still want to do things on the Internet that will give the State a pretext to come after you, after all that, you need to get your head examined. If you insist on doing so anyway, and there are consequences, don't say you weren't warned.