Intelligence agencies still use olde skool techniques for a very good reasons. No electronic coms method is 100% secure, Tor included. In fact, the sense of security it provides is a problem in its self. Want privacy? First strike out electronic coms.
I have to wonder if nowadays its safer to simply pick up an analogue telephone, call up your terrorist cell, gun runner, drug dealer, politician, prosecutor, whatever, and simply tell them what to do. Or just write an old fashioned letter. Would the NSA even see that coming? Yeah, I know.....
Who is being "spied" on. I find it odd that uber evil people would even begin to use the internet for communicating. We "geeks" are paranoid enough, how paranoid are the evil doers? Would they not just assume that what ever electronics they are using, some government agency will have a way in? I would. Most here seem to have that feeling. But international terrorists and bankers don't? (I include bankers because they have damaged me and every one I know more so than any terrorist could ever hope to. They are so much better at terrorising me than AQ could ever have hoped to.)
Well, law enforcement must surely know this, so what is all the data they are collecting and back doors for? Not big evil crime, so it must be for us, the "plebs".
How useful is all this data for politicians and power people? Business, politics and people control. That what it is for. We get blinded by scare stories, while a mass of benign data is used to help those in power remain there. What else is there?
This is why dropbox communications are preferred to point-to-point protocols, where a dropbox might be a physical box, but is more likely to be a classified posting in a newspaper (old school), online classifieds (hello, Craigslist), radio "numbers station", a posting on a community bulletin board, flyers on telephone poles (or other public property), etc. Often the overt message will be putatively legitimate (an item for sale, a job offer, services offering, business advert), but coded within it will be a ciphertext message of interest to the designated target.
In a recent discussion (which I can't track down at the moment) of Wikileaks and Julian Assange somone noted the juxtiposition of photos of Wikileaks' own dataceter, and the paper-based filing system of the FBI during the 1950s. Whilst computers make accessing, analyzing, and searching through large record dumps much more efficient, they also make disclosure of those same documents to others, including unauthorized others, more efficient.
I have to wonder if nowadays its safer to simply pick up an analogue telephone, call up your terrorist cell, gun runner, drug dealer, politician, prosecutor, whatever, and simply tell them what to do. Or just write an old fashioned letter. Would the NSA even see that coming? Yeah, I know.....