That's the narrative. Just like Tor's narrative is that it helps America's spies communicate from hostile jurisdictions. The former never got the attention as back then we had monoculture shaped by mainstream media (no other alternatives) and we just ate up whatever we were told.
The latter appears to be under more scrutiny lately, leading us to believe this is just like the lofty idea that VPN encryption is completely anonymous from the big five.
Spies operating out of China or Russia would never use VPN or Tor? That would be painting a red target on their backs. So I wonder what the true intention is for Tor as is the mysterious origin of Bitcoin and so many other things. We won't know.
One thing is for sure, what we believed to be bastions of Western democracy and privacy are no more.
I'm no expert on Tor, but IIRC the story is precisely that spies operating from hostile territory would have a red target painted on them from using encrypted communications...unless a whole lot of people in that hostile territory were also using encrypted communications. This is why Tor was released open source and wide adoption was encouraged.
It's been known that if you connected to Tor in a hotel located in this US allied country (there have been briefings published around this so you can take a guess) you would immediately become visible and targeted for a drive by.
Tor just isn't as common as you think nor is it widely adopted due to unreliable and the problem with that cover explanation is that you wouldn't know where Tor is widely used in the first place to be able to find "safety in numbers".
If you use Tor without VPN as most do, it won't be your ISP that sees your domain lookups mate
If you do use VPN with Tor as some do, it won't be your ISP either.
We have an illusion of privacy because there is no true privacy anymore with digital technology and without privacy we don't have true freedom and as such we only live in a democracy in name only.
The latter appears to be under more scrutiny lately, leading us to believe this is just like the lofty idea that VPN encryption is completely anonymous from the big five.
Spies operating out of China or Russia would never use VPN or Tor? That would be painting a red target on their backs. So I wonder what the true intention is for Tor as is the mysterious origin of Bitcoin and so many other things. We won't know.
One thing is for sure, what we believed to be bastions of Western democracy and privacy are no more.