> According to a Tor blog post, someone during that period was infiltrating the network by offering new relays, then altering the traffic subtly so as to weaken Tor's anonymity protections. By attacking the system from within, they were able to trace traffic across the network, effectively following the server traffic back to their home IP.

This is network-wide. They did not and could not target just Silk Road 2 and its users, they sabotaged the anonymity of every user and service on Tor.

A title 3 wiretap requires trust in both the government and network operator, which users of Tor may be avoiding for entirely legitimate reasons.

I'm not seeing the moral distinction between title 3 wiretaps and Tor infiltration. It can't simply be that people on Tor have expressed an unwillingness to be tapped. Every rational actor has that preference in both scenarios.

Wiretaps conducted by the FBI apply to installations in the US. Let's say I'm a dissident in my own (not the USA) country. An FBI wiretap does not compromise me wrt. my own government. Tampering with Tor on a large scale, however, has very much the potential to do so.

Every rational actor has that preference, but not that expectation. I'm well aware that my ISP can eavesdrop on everything that happens over their network, and can extend that ability to any party they choose.

I agree that there is no moral distinction between a title 3 wiretap and Tor infiltration, however a title 3 wiretap is a passive listener while this Tor infiltration is not. The nature of the Tor infiltration caused anonymity to be stripped and readable by anyone aware of the flaw. They used resources unavailable to others to expose that information not only for themselves but to everyone.

The equivalent would be streaming a title 3 wiretap sans filter to everyone on the internet.

If you go through the exercise of building a mental model of exactly what a title 3 wiretap facility on a packet-switched telephony network looks like, and then carefully study the covert channel traffic confirmation attack the Tor team disclosed and everyone presumes the FBI is using, you'll see that the technical differences are not that great. It's certainly not as black-and-white as "passive" versus "active".

I'm not sure I follow the point about how the FBI could have done grave damage to everyone's privacy. It's (hypothetically, assuming this is how the FBI did it) the relay-early traffic confirmation vulnerability that did that. The FBI didn't create that vulnerability.

Perhaps you need to update your expectations? Merely expecting Tor to be secure does not make it so.

I'm not sure if this is what Zykes is referring to. But this particular attack on Tor is different from a wiretap because it made traffic readable by the whole network, not only by the attackers.

In what I think you mean by a perturbation attack, the attacker would deanonymize traffic by influence timing of packets on one end and observing the other end. Only the attacker learns anything. But in this attack, the hidden service directories found a clever way of broadcasting the name of the requested service, in plaintext, to the rest of the circuit. The attackers could read the message, but so could anyone else running a Tor relay.

Given that the message could have been trivially encrypted, that does seem like pointless collateral damage.