It's even better than that; tor was built to be used by spooks to cover their open-source intelligence gathering efforts. [0] Tor continues to be used by those same parties for those purposes.

Also, the Tor Project periodically sends out folks to remind the FBI and friends that tor has many legitimate uses, and is routinely used by law enforcement agencies as part of their day-to-day business. [1]

[0] https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-talk/2011-March/0...

[1] https://blog.torproject.org/blog/trip-report-october-fbi-con...