In 2013 arguably the biggest breach of online national security ever was reported. An ex employer of the NSA, Edward Snowden, leaked between 9,000 – 10,000 legal documents. These leaks contained detailed evidence of operations that the United States government had been running both at home and overseas. In relation to Tor, two major pieces of evidence were released. The Washington Post revealed two damning pieces of evidence highlighting that the NSA was getting close, if not already, to cracking Tor;
“Since 2006, according to a 49-page research paper titled simply “Tor,” the agency has worked on several methods that, if successful, would allow the NSA to uncloak anonymous traffic on a “wide scale” — effectively by watching communications as they enter and exit the Tor system, rather than trying to follow them inside. One type of attack, for example, would identify users by minute differences in the clock times on their computers.” (Gellman, Timberg, Rich, 2013)

The second piece of evidence was leaked notes from a meeting that the NSA had with one of the programmers of Tor, Roger Dingledine. The notes suggested that the NSA wished to talk to Dingledine about the technical side of Tor. After the notes of the meeting were leaked, The Washington Post contacted Dingledine to get a comment. Dingledine echoed the thoughts of many Tor users;

“As he spoke to the NSA, he suspected the agency was attempting to break into Tor, which is used by millions of people around the world to shield their identities.” (Gellman, Timberg, Rich, 2013)

He later confirmed the possible weaknesses of Tor when facing government tracings;

“Extremely well funded adversaries that are able to observe large portions of the Internet can probably break aspects of Tor and may be able to deanonymize users. This is why the core tor program currently has a version number of 0.2.x and comes with a warning that it is not to be used for “strong anonymity”. (Levine, 2014)