This is not a real disadvantage!The TOR network is worth billions to the US government in political capital! It's a way of extending their soft power across the world (100k Iranians access the TOR network) and for their agents across the world to relay information anonymously from any internet access point.They will never sacrifice TOR, even if they could do it, in order to displace the Silk Road. It does not make political or economic sense.There are dramatically more malicious entities using TOR than us. There are genuine terrorists, child molester communities and much much worse on here too.At this point, TOR is as much 'part of the government' as the Internet is part of the 'DARPA program'. Not very, although there's some truth to both.tldr; even if they tried to manipulate TOR into busting everybody, we would hardly be the first in line by a long stretch.Addendum: Bearing everything I've just said in mind, it behooves us to also pay heed to kmfkewm's thought that you cannot necessarily depend on the Government to behave rationally. In some respects, governments behave as rational, coherent entities, but there are circumstances, not uncommon, in which they act in a dream-like state, almost unconsciously. Much of the evils that Government do, they do so completely unaware of their actions and the consequences. In particular, you find this in those areas that the Government tends to be reactive. They often dramatically undershoot or overshoot when implementing judicial reforms or police operations. The larger the Government, the more bizarre the occurrences. Roads that lead literally nowhere into the desert, multi-billion dollar spacecraft left to rust as giant garden ornaments at Cape Canaveral, secret projects to which the government no longer supports or understands, but they labor on since one department forgot to tell the other. You couldn't make it up. Sometimes I watch and think they have Alzheimer's disease.