'Tor Stinks' - Joint NSA GCHQ counter-Tor workshop

Someone contacted me with a suggestion to search for a document titled 'Tor Stinks'. I didn't have time to talk at the moment which is unfortunate because they also stated that they knew that one guy on the Tor development team was an 'agent'. I don't think i know the person who contacted me and so i have no idea whether the claim is creditable, but it certainly doesn't sound unlikely regardless of the alleged fact that Tor was developed for DoD/government use and is still being funded by the same. There is obviously competition, infighting and spying within different areas of government as well as a massive interest in spying on the activities of Joe Public.

The 'Tor Stinks' document is dated 2012 and was published by the Guardian in 2013. Here's a direct link to a PDF version.

Top-secret presentation says 'We will never be able to de-anonymize all Tor users all the time' but 'with manual analysis we can de-anonymize a very small fraction of Tor users'

Given that the document was dated 2012, some of the exploits may have been addressed by now, however many of the suggested ways to de-anonymize Tor users doesn't depend on vulnerabilities in Tor at all. There's also a very interesting line in the document...

Scaring them away from Tor might be counterproductive.

The opposite is also true; scaring Tor users unnecessarily would be a threat to free speech, potentially resulting in self-censorship, and given the way the document is written, as well as its title, it isn't difficult to imagine that it may have been purposely "leaked" for exactly that purpose. Nevertheless, i personally don't trust Tor.

See also, Tor versus a VPN - Which is right for you?, but know that VPNs cannot be trusted either. For example, see Vulnerabilities in VPNs: Paper presented at the Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium 2024 - The Citizen Lab.