I'll share an exchange I had with a Reddit user about this topic. It started a month ago when the "Feds cover-up documents about how local police use stingrays" story broke. We ended up having what I felt was a fairly productive discussion come out of what began as hyperbolic one line quips; he was generally supportive of government surveillance, saying: In the end, he advocated that I run a tor node as well. Fast forward two weeks later and the XKeyscore leak shed some new light on the USG's relationship with TOR; remembering my previous exchange with him, I sent him a PM asking if he had an opinion on it. He responded but was generally dismissive of it, essentially saying that most of it was already known. Looking at it now, he hasn't been on Reddit since, so who knows what happened to him. At the end of our exchange, I said: I knew, even before talking with him, from my own research about TOR, that it was born as a military project, but I was under the impression that it was no longer under the control of the USG, and I certainly didn't know that most (all?) of the TOR traffic was being surveilled, stored, analysed and deanonymized by the NSA. I would wager that most schmucks like me probably didn't know that. Am I right to not want to be involved in TOR given what is now known?Most of what we say is monitored, that is true, but that started by voluntary consent. We give our information to third party corporations who are not as strongly protected by the Fourth Amendment, and then wondered why the government chose to dig up that treasure trove. If you want to protect yourself from that, you can use a service designed by our own government, called Tor. When used properly, it is nearly impossible to crack.
I believe in the value of privacy and I think the aims of the TOR project are worth supporting, but after talking it over with my partner, I'm not sure I would feel comfortable running a TOR node on my home computer. It seems like it is only bound to increase one's NSA footprint and despite so many people being rather cavalier about NSA lists and databases, I'd prefer to avoid them where possible and convenient.
Chelsea Manning, back when she was Bradley, observed that the best defense against surveillance is to have a low profile. After all, they're listening to everything and recording everything. But they're not analyzing everything. The NSA's approach is now and has always been to increase the likelihood of finding a needle in a haystack by making the haystack as large as possible. Firing up a TOR node is basically like lighting a match next to your needle. Suddenly there's smoke, burning embers, crackling, etc. Granted - the NSA may or may not (go with may) be able to read what's coming out of and going into that TOR node... but all of a sudden, they have a reason to care. Intelligence is about profiling, probability and surveillance. If you match the profile of someone they're interested in, there's a probability you will experience surveillance.