I doubt he cooperates with FBI. Sign one that you don't know anything about Tor is the fact that you call it TOR instead of Tor, which means you probably learned about it from the media and not from academic papers. Doesn't mean your opinion is worthless, but it is a good indication that you are a noob. Second, Tor is open source software and anyone is free to check the source code. I stay in contact with multiple people who regularly follow Tor development and they would notice a backdoor if one was added. I doubt they all will cooperate. Tor has 15 developers and they live in a variety of different countries and audit each others code, compromising Arma will not be enough to compromise Tor in the way you say. Anyway if the code was added and then removed days later only the people and hidden services and relays that upgraded in that time window would have been compromised. Relays and hidden services in particular are usually some versions behind, but even users don't stay as up to date as they should. I don't understand the preoccupation that noobs have with exit nodes. It is probably because they know that exit nodes can log traffic that exits the network. In reality I am far more concerned about entry guards, if Tor has an Achilles heel it is in the guard nodes not the exit nodes. To do correlation attacks against SR users LE will need to be able to monitor the entry guards of the clients connecting to it as well as silk road server itself (possibly via owning its entry guards), "exit nodes" have little to do with correlation attacks against hidden services and when it comes to Tor to the normal internet the entry guard is still the most vulnerable part not the exit (as far as correlation attacks go). FM fell because of a combination of using hushmail and insecure payment techniques. The most important security lesson for people on SR to learn is that you are as anonymous as your least anonymized network overlay. The Tor network overlay is a lot better than the paypal or mail systems (for receiving). The most important thing to do is start obtaining your bitcoins anonymously and cashing them out anonymously if you are not already, and understanding that Bitcoin is no better than Paypal unless you take steps to anonymize it yourself with your cash in and out technique, preferably using mixes in addition to this (using mixes by themselves is great for unlinkability but you will still risk money laundering charges).