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Of course, this is basically why they invented it in the first place.

And why they open sourced it. All the fancy onion routing would be useless if the fact that you use it already identified you as a CIA spy. They need other people to use it as well for TOR to be useful to them.

I think what you have identified is that the US government is not, in any sense of the word, an it.

> I can totally imagine they're using Tor for some undercover (foreign) operations or similar. I don't think the US Government with all its branches is known to practise exactly what it preaches.

The US government has different parts with different goals: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2013/10/05... (paywalled). IIRC, the NSA has interests in conducting surveillance, and the State Department has interests in allowing liberal foreign dissidents to defeat surveillance.

Ironically meaning that the gov does the cat and mouse game with itself. Self-reinforcement learning. Quite an effective optimization method if we're being honest.