At least in the US law enforcement can't charge you with anything. More people need to run exit relays, especially from home, so it becomes an accepted use.

> At least in the US law enforcement can't charge you with anything

Citation please? Last I checked people get charged with things they didn't do, or weren't responsible for, in just about every system of justice - that's why we have courts.

Ah, fair point, I meant convicted. However ISPs threatening to cut off your service for running a Tor relay is a good indication you won't even be charged, as the ISP (and the local authorities) should know you have safe harbor.

This leads to the other issue of your service being cut...

If you want to run an exit node do it on a hosting service. You can get a VPS for $5/m. Why risk getting arrested by running it at home?

Because the hosting service and its IP block are all geographically constrained. This makes correlation attacks easier, as well as attacks requiring physical access.

I thought the consensus was that law enforcement can "crack" Tor these days (a la tracing the illegal traffic back to the source, not just the exit node)

Is this not the case, or is it not a black/white answer?

No, that's not true.

Tor's anonymity depends on distributed control of its nodes. If one entity, say a government org, controls a large portion of entry and exit nodes it may be able to trace some requests. That's an attack that has been known since the beginning though, it's not new.

https://2019.www.torproject.org/docs/faq.html.en#AttacksOnOn... It's not 100%, but the more of the connection your attacker can see, the worse your odds. If you're in the USA and you're using nodes in the Five Eyes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Eyes and you're being tracked by the NSA, they might be able to see everything. Maybe. Also check point #4 on this answer https://2019.www.torproject.org/docs/faq.html.en#EverybodyAR...

People will hack the sites that are proxied behind Tor .onion domains. Hacking a site is also a crime, so you won't find too many documents revealing how a crime network was exposed. Instead, they gather data from the hacked servers and hand it over as anonymous tips.

Tor is just a proxy. A fancy proxy that uses onion routing, but a proxy nonetheless. Think of it as a CDN that does not have to hand over customer details because they have plausible deniability about who you are. Unlike commercial CDN's however, Tor does not try to prevent hacking. That exercise is left to the people running the servers that Tor is routing to. As it turns out, some criminals may be lazy or inept.