Think bigger, say what?

Certain of the world's biggest and most well-funded intelligence agencies hate personal privacy on the internet so much that they've been going to extreme efforts to destroy it. They are packet sniffing the NAPs and fiber backbones to pull out everything they can, they hacked/broke HTTPS, they are backdoored into the big content providers, they hacked the banking system, they are apparently 'in' some hardware crypto chips - the list goes on -

They infiltrated the tech groups which were designing software and hardware and sabotaged their work, making their crypto be weaker/breakable and their systems easier to hack into. They use the vulnerabilities they created to their own ends.

As of today, Tor appears to provide privacy, at least as far as the .onion sites goes. Maybe it even works for it's entire function of providing anonymous internet browsing.

'They' would definitely want to be IN this thing, because they either want to compromise it, or if that doesn't work well enough, destroy it. 'They' are known to infiltrate and be influential in getting what they want. Literally, they are professionals at this. 'Getting to know' the exit relay operators and identifying their bank accounts would help facilitate things when it came time for them to make their move.

In the context of September 2013, this whole thing is scary. It was perhaps not scary in September of 2012, when we didn't know anything.

Also. It makes me wonder things when, for example, you say "Think bigger" while pointing to a couple of potential dollars in someone's pocket. Safeguarding the operators of the exit relays is a bigger deal than chump change. I'm not making an honest accusation but, to the people who are the most vocal in approving of this - you don't work for the NSA, right? :)