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budbadman420 t1_iuc0lrm wrote

They use it themselves, it's extremely hard to take down due to the nature of it and just blocking it is easy to circumvent and banning it would cause an absolute uproar. They just leave it be and try to go after the individual websites that do the worst stuff. That being said countries like china have blocked the website that you download it on to make it that much harder to access, but like I said it's super easy to circumvent

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Em_Adespoton t1_iuc2ebs wrote

The Onion Router was invented by a branch of the US government and is heavily supported by the German government (they run a LOT of exit nodes).

This is because TOR allows their operatives to do things that would otherwise be illegal in foreign countries.

Also, controlling the exit nodes means you might not know who is doing what, but you still get a pretty good idea of what’s happening, just not who is doing it - so it’s a great source of intel.

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Luckbot t1_iuc2xeg wrote

TOR is far from completely secure. Both governments and hackercollectives have identifid people in the network. (It's a bunch of effort though)

And if governments planned to stop the existence how would they do that? It's completely decentralized, you can't just order the nodes to be shut down, they are all around the globe.

Also as others have mentioned the US government created TOR, and is actively using it

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Leftstone2 t1_iuc4ehv wrote

What Tor does isn't technically illegal. Just because Tor is frequently used for illegal activity doesn't make the creators of Tor culpable for the illegal activity that happens on it. You wouldn't arrest a Toyota executive if it was found out that Toyotas were the most popular vehicle for drug smuggling, would you. Not unless the executive was specifically marketing to or enabling drug dealers.

The United States could probably introduce legislation that would make Tor illegal and then spend the decades working with other countries to try and get it shut down. However by the time they got any of that legislation Tor would be changed just enough to be legal or would be replaced by a copycat that did follow the new legal guidelines.

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