Anyone can run a relay or exit node without asking permission. I've done both from a VPS with a complete anon account. No arrests have happened thus far from a Tor compromise. Users usually slip up in their opsec and privacy in some other way. Plenty of "illegal" services persist as tor hidden services, certainly not because the US intellegence allows it. Claiming they can "shut it down" or "subvert it" just because they invented it, is like claiming they can do it to the Internet itself since thet also invented it.

No one said anything about stopping someone trying to contribute a relay/node. However, do you understand how the 9 directory servers work and how they alone choose the circuits? Thereby, being able to drop your relays/nodes, if they wanted? They've already done it before with relays they deemed malicious/unwanted. My comments weren't even about that part, but at an even higher-level of the Tor network, which is the brain of the network (the directory servers).

According to the view of Mike Benz (who I've recently discovered), the US government was pro free speech until 2014. Free speech and things like Tor helped America to topple governments around the world, by subverting the views of their citizenry via free speech. I thought that was perfectly OK to do, as long as they were just convincing those citizens that democracy and human rights were worth fighting for (without dirty tricks) and those citizens then overthrew their oppressive government to get democracy and free speech. But since 2014 things took a major turn against free speech. Crimea, through free speech, discovered the CIA coup and decided they didn't want to be involved in this new Western government, and did a counter-coup with the assistance of Russia which ended up in Russia annexing Crimea. The US was not pleased. They changed their policy going forward. Now speech couldn't be free, speech had to be aligned with US goals or else the US would find reasons to censor or block it. The election of Trump and Brexit just hardened their resolve. So Tor is not quite so welcome anymore, and I wouldn't be suprised if it gets shut down exactly as you describe.

It would certainly take a major coordinated effort for all of the countries to fall in line in order to shutdown the directory servers, no question. The likelihood of it ever happening? It's certainly plausible, but I'm still mixed on if realistically feasible. Though, that's exactly the point of my earlier note. The fact that it is even possible, should be alarming. And as you bring up, the West is now increasingly becoming anti-free-speech, often targeting activists. Which I acknowledge the correctness in @sommerfeld saying in most cases those arrested were due to bad OpSec. That's absolutely true. However, as far as I know, the likes of fiatjaf couldn't one day decide which Nostr relays/nodes he likes/dislikes and effectively shut down any of them by having some centralized directory servers signal to "nostr browser" that they should no longer use those relays/nodes, unlike what the Tor Project can do. So, there is an element of centralization that folks should be more aware of with Tor. What they do with this information is up to them. At no point have I said people should stop using Tor, simply by knowing said information.

Revolution is certainly plausible as well.

Bitcoin does not work without seed nodes Bittorrent does not work without trackers Welcome to P2P!

You still need a tracker to get the initial peers. Try publishing a torrent without a tracker and see if someone picks it up...

I'm done it (successfully), but only once, and then, only because I could dump the torrent out to around 500 peeps, some of which ran with it etc.

You were the defacto tracker