Tor network hacked by Feds, Silk Road turned into honeypot?

The Onion Router, better known as the Tor Network, is often thought of as being the dark-side of the web. Not least as the anonymity provided by Tor meant that sites hosted on so-called hidden service servers were free to trade in just about anything from drugs and guns through to child pornography. In amongst the depravity and illegal excess, of course, were political activists and dissidents looking for an online safe haven in order to escape persecution, prosecution and potentially death. Revelations that the FBI would appear to have been behind the takedown of Freedom Hosting, apparently responsible for a bunch of hidden services which included alleged child pornography image servers, could be very bad news indeed. Not just for drug dealers, arms dealers and paedophiles but for anyone who has relied upon the multi-layered and encrypted onion network to retain their anonymity.