SR is still up because the very powerful adversaries that do exist don't give a shit about it. If the NSA really wanted to pwn SR I am quite confident that they could do so. First of all , tracing hidden services is not even that impressive. There are attacks for tracing them up to their entry guards in a matter of minutes. At that point they are as anonymous as someone using THREE one hop proxies, which isn't even as safe as using a single one hop proxy. If any of the entry guards are in the USA, it would only be a matter of time to passively put one of the entry guards under surveillance, with the CALEA compliant infrastructure or in the case of the NSA with their Narusinsight super computers that are plugged into split fiber optic cables moving most internet traffic in the USA through them. After locating the hidden service they could passively monitor it and wait for targets to use entry guards that they passively monitor, that would get people using USA based entry guards pretty rapidly, as having any US entry guards would mean you are deanonymized in short order. Or they could just break out their zero day arsenal and craft an attack that can exploit Apache on Ubuntu to root the SR server, then from there exploit a vulnerability in Firefox and root DPR, possibly another exploit for breaking out of Virtualbox isolation to get to his host OS, and then steal his IP address and send it back to themselves. if he uses random WiFi locations they they have to get around that as well. I am not saying it is trivial to do, but the NSA stockpiles zero days and it is quite likely they already have a combination that could be used to cut through all of DPR's security measures, or the security measures of anyone else here. You could keep your encryption keys and bitcoins safe from them with air gaps, but not your IP address. They wouldn't even need to spend a million or two dollars to be able to do this against DPR, because they have already spent many millions of dollars to be able to do this against whatever target comes to interest them (Iranian nuclear centrifuges being a likely example of such a target). At the end of the day you are going to be hard pressed to keep yourself secure against an elite organization with billions of dollars at their disposal, and essentially a free pass to break whatever laws they want. But also at the end of the day, this is not our threat model. We are not a hostile foreign government, we are not Osama Bin Laden and we are not trying to steal sensitive US intelligence. We are drug dealers, not even as powerful as the Mexican or Columbian cartels, and our enemies are the FBI, DEA, USPI and ICE, not the CIA or NSA.