Okay here is my take on this. First of all, I have no idea about that ISP or the percentage of Tor nodes that are hosted by them. It seems that they are a big ISP, so they probably do carry a lot of Tor traffic. As to the claim that the NSA or CIA owns them, well who knows. Nobody really thinks that Tor will keep them anonymous from the NSA anyway. They have Narusinsight super computers at many major IX's and they can passively monitor all Tor traffic that goes through the USA anyway. Even if they couldn't passively monitor huge portions of US internet traffic, they can hack into pretty much anything and they could by pass Tor to get to targets if they really wanted to. The CIA can by pass Tor to get to targets if they really want to. It is silly to think that the NSA would actively add nodes to the Tor network when they can already passively monitor traffic into and out of all Tor nodes in the USA. A single Narusinsight surveillance computer can completely monitor and record traffic from several thousand residential internet links in real time, and the NSA has at least half a dozen of these things at major internet hubs across the USA. Also, they don't monitor in real time but rather switch rapidly between connections (sampling), allowing them to gather enough traffic for correlation attacks against millions of internet connections. Monitoring the few thousand Tor nodes in USA is not going to be a problem for them. Passively monitoring enough Tor traffic to do massive damage against Tor is easy enough to do for IX level attackers without the need for them to add a single node to the network : http://freehaven.net/anonbib/cache/murdoch-pet2007.pdf (Sampled Traffic Analysis by Internet-Exchange-Level Adversaries) This makes his claim that the NSA may own these nodes to be dubious at best. The NSA doesn't need to own Tor nodes to break Tor anonymity. The other intelligence agencies he named may not have as much signals intelligence as the NSA, and may need to add their own nodes if they don't want to just hack their way past Tor. We have not got a lot to worry about intelligence agencies. Intelligence agencies actually do have bigger things to worry about than us. Some of them, like the NSA, are legally restricted from spying on US citizens unless they are in contact with terrorists or foreign intelligence agents. This does not mean that they respect the law, but it does mean that they rarely if ever bring their illegal activity to light by busting drug dealers. If he had any proof that the FBI or DEA owned that big ISP, I would be a little bit more worried. But he doesn't have proof that Cogent is a front for any agency, from NSA to your local police. He calls Tor TOR, which is usually a dead give away that somebody actually doesn't know that much about Tor. In academic articles it is called Tor, researchers studying it call it Tor, the media calls it TOR and usually people who call it TOR have learned everything they know about it from the media. He acts like I2P is superior to Tor. In reality, the NSA can monitor the US based I2P servers just as easily as they can monitor the US based Tor servers. I2P has a handful of its own issues as well. Down time correlations against hidden services can deanonymize them as soon as they have down time, and it is easy to get the list of all I2P routers and therefor users as well. It is a bit harder to do this attack than I once thought, as nodes are not immediately unlisted once they go down. However, an attacker can keep pinging every I2P node and wait for a hidden service to go down (or DDOS the hidden service) and see which node stops replying to pings when the hidden service goes down. I2P would be absolutely horrible for Silk Road entirely because of the fact that everybody is a router. Fifty thousand or so people use I2P currently, they are spread through out the world, and it is easy to get all of their IP addresses. Guess what happens now when some vendor in New York sends a drug package to the police? The police see all of the I2P routers in New York and they have already narrowed in on their target, if the target lives in a remote area the police can probably deanonymize him immediately after seeing where he ships from. In short, this guy is admittedly speculating, he has not given any real proof, he suggests using a network that is much worse than Tor for our specific threat model and imo in general, he thinks that NSA would actively attack Tor when in reality they would almost certainly passively attack it and he doesn't appear to have researched Tor much because he calls it TOR. I am not very worried from what he said, and I would chalk this up to FUD or possibly even worse considering he seems to suggest that Silk Road starts using I2P despite the fact that I2P would be the absolute worst choice for Silk Road users.