Good old Yasha! If you've been paying attention to his works, you'll be underwhelmed by this particular post. He repeats his claims, many of which are easily verifiable and simultaneously without significance.
Yes, Tor updates fiscal sponsors with regards to project status.
Yes, Tor is USG funded. No, it's not a Honeypot. It's also not a panacea.
As a technical project based in Cambridge, MA, Tor doesn't exist in a political vacuum.
If Tor was more of a pain to the USG than a benefit, it likely would not have been able to grow to the extent it has, but this by no means is indicative of a comprehensive system failure or any significant subterfuge on the part of Tor developers. I do not believe Yasha or anyone else has evidence to the contrary.
To be clear, I dislike Yasha as a self-aggrandizing spinlord shipping a conspiracy theory laden set of tenuous hypothesis, but I've gone out of my way to read the documents he's released to date
Thanks for the link, which presumably contains the OC I'm about to reference.
We've seen several classified documents claiming (pick a three letter USG agency) have minimal operational ability to deanonymize a particular Tor user, and even less-so in real-time.
Fortunately, the FBI has proven it doesn't need to break Tor to interfere with the most egregious of the malactors who call it home. They've hijacked servers hosting objectionable content and used them to deliver Firefox exploits to leak real IP addresses.[1] They've done "good old fashioned police work" and exploited human trust [2] to bring down well coordinated teams of international players.
In any case, using Tor is better than not. "We have plenty of academic research and mathematical proofs that tell us quite clearly that the more people use Tor, the better the privacy, anonymity, and traffic analysis resistance properties will become."
And in the examples you gave, a Qubes OS+Whonix setup would've prevented those exploits from leaking the IP, unless the adversary has a Xen exploit.
> but it has always been the thing that made me doubtful about Tor.
If they weren't open about what they did with that funding, and the funding came directly from the NSA? Sure! That would've left everyone pretty doubtful. But since their funding comes from things like the NSF, OTF, ... and they're pretty open about the deliverables that each sponsor seeks[1] (for e.g. [2]), then there's really no reason to be doubtful.
