I'm still a bit lost as to what legitimate use a Congressional candidate would have for anonymity. If they need someone to do adversarial research anonymously, they should "have people for that"... since if the anonymity is breached, it would expose only the deniable asset. "Rogue employee" or such...

As for why Tor Browser Bundle sucks: https://medium.com/@thegrugq/tor-and-its-discontents-ef51648...

Plenty of things combined, but not least of which is that Mozilla only patches High + Critical bugs in long term stable release builds, so you can just chain Low + Medium known vulnerabilities together until you get access.

The only safe way to use Tor is with a router acting providing a secure middle point for "upgrading" all traffic to Tor. That way if the end point is compromised, it cannot beacon information back w/o being forced through Tor. This is why I don't like software solutions that provide Tor access and are tenant on the same hardware. It simply means that one additional exploit breaks the system. A Tor router (a good one, none of the commercial ones are) will expose only the DHCP server [optional] and the Tor SOCKS5 proxy port. Leaving an attacker with only a very small attack surface: the Linux kernel network stack and the Tor daemon. A software solution with co-tenant router (such as Qubes, or Whonix) has the same attack surface plus a hypervisor and (potentially) a shared kernel interface (i.e. the entire kernel API). Tor Browser Bundle is even worse as there is no Tor router, simply an app that is configured to use Tor, and if it is compromised then the code executed by the attacker can elect not to use Tor as the system itself is networked.

Tor has very few use cases IMHO, and since one of them is "purchasing drugs from a reputable source," I don't really see why Congressional candidates should ever use it themselves. A VPN, on the other hand, is different.

I would actually extend the guide by @idlewords and say "install the Freedome VPN on all your iOS devices, enable it, buy the $30 a year service, and forget about it. You'll have a secure IKEv2 VPN to a reasonably[0] safe end point that is doing active filtering for malicious sites as well as some trackers and ad blocking (the source of most 'drive by malware.') This one app will make all public WiFi safe[1] to use, it will increase your privacy [by aggregating your traffic with other people's exiting that same IP], and help to reduce your exposure to known bad websites that serve malware."

[0] 'reasonably safe end point' in that it is operated by F-Secure, not anonymous and potentially malicious agents. F-Secure has a reputation to maintain and actively sniffing traffic for secrets (e.g. Wikileaks) or inserting malware into downloads (e.g. various threat actors) would be the end of their business. They are probably capable of securing an end point as well as anyone else, and if you aren't technical enough to setup Algo VPN yourself then Freedome is a reasonable compromise. Vastly better than fly-by-night "bittorrent safe, logless!" "we put OpenVPN on a VPS" VPN companies.

[1] yes, nothing is truly safe, the NSA is logging all encrypted traffic for years, chemtrails don't care about IPSec and jet fuel can't melt APs, thanks for your pedantic observation.