@Supermule:
Dont expect anything to be safe. Look who created TOR. And ask yourself that question again…
Since people may not understand the reference that Brian is making here:
Quoting wikipedia:
The Tor Project, Inc is a Massachusetts-based 501(3) research-education nonprofit organization founded by computer scientists Roger Dingledine, Nick Mathewson and five others.
Onion routing was developed in the mid-1990s at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory by employees Paul Syverson, Michael Reed, and David Goldschlag to protect U.S. intelligence communications online. It was further developed by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and patented by the Navy in 1998.
The actual network that people refer to as Tor belongs to the people who furnish the nodes used by it.
Tor was not invented to provide anonymity against a well-funded aggressor, such as the US Government. It was created to enable dissidents in areas governed by relatively unsophisticated entities to be able to securely communicate between themselves and to the outside world. Measured against it's original goal, Tor is a success. But the script kiddies decided that they had found a better VPN, and the ability to spend money (such that some large percentage of Tor nodes is under the control of a single entity) trumps the architecture of Tor.
Tor is safe enough if you're a journalist in a third-world country. It was never intended as a defensive measure against the likes of the NSA / CIA / ...
