[jballanc]

I'm no expert on Tor, but IIRC the story is precisely that spies operating from hostile territory would have a red target painted on them from using encrypted communications...unless a whole lot of people in that hostile territory were also using encrypted communications. This is why Tor was released open source and wide adoption was encouraged.

[localfirst]

It's been known that if you connected to Tor in a hotel located in this US allied country (there have been briefings published around this so you can take a guess) you would immediately become visible and targeted for a drive by.

Tor just isn't as common as you think nor is it widely adopted due to unreliable and the problem with that cover explanation is that you wouldn't know where Tor is widely used in the first place to be able to find "safety in numbers".