> It also doubles as a way for the US government to surveil anyone seeking to evade surveillance as well.
Supposing they own now enough Tor node, which the Wikipedia link is unclear about
It seems like a reasonable claim judging by how much easier and cheaper it is to spin up 10s of thousands of nodes than it was a decade ago. Even a wealthy person with a miniscule fraction of the US defense budget could do the same.
Idk if there is a technical solution to this attack problem.
There are solutions, but they come at a steep cost with regards to usability, so would shrink the anonymity set to what would be an unacceptable level for the uses Tor cares about. The reality is that these attacks, while theoretically possible, require more work and money than the rewards justify (you can't just bulk buy nodes from a provider, Tor doesn't allow connections that route to the same host or close IPs, and does somewhat regularly block relays that were all created suspiciously close chronologically without identifying as the same operator), so are considered an acceptable risk. Snowden was willing to rely on Tor, the rest of us who just want some extra privacy will be just fine.
> It also doubles as a way for the US government to surveil anyone seeking to evade surveillance as well.
On a technical level, exit node operators aren't supposed to be able to trace the origin of data flowing through them... so this indicates a failure of protocol.
See the sources cited at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tor_(network)#Exit_node_eavesd...