Not many may be aware that proxies, vpns and tor nodes are often run by businesses with connections to intelligence agencies like the FBI, NSA, CIA. Its an industry standard for virtually anything IT related.
I think this point is a bit misleading. VPN's are regularly used to connect to a local network within a company and that type are very unlikely to be of interest to the intelligence agencies. Proxies can also be used for both good and bad. However TOR nodes tend to have a slightly different reputation and are not commonly used in general commercial enterprises. Grouping them all up is a bit unfair. In response to the main piece of news: these bitcoin mixers literally have no other purpose than to disguise the source of funds, which is pretty much the definition of money laundering and it was always going to end up badly for them. Kind of glad that law enforcement have finally taken some action, as it has been going on for years.
Security researchers have spent more than the last 10 years trying various methods to break TOR. Here's a classic example from 2007:
Security researcher intercepts embassy passwords from TorSEP 10, 2007
A security researcher who collected thousands of sensitive e-mails and passwords from the embassies of countries such as Russia and India blamed systems administrators on Monday for not using encryption to shield their traffic from snooping.
Dan Egerstad, a 21-year-old security researcher, revealed on Monday he was able to capture the information by setting up his own node in a peer-to-peer network used by the embassies to make their Internet traffic anonymous.
https://www.infoworld.com/article/2649832/security-researcher-intercepts-embassy-passwords-from-tor.html Services like VPNs, proxies and TOR could be utilized to upload viruses, malware or conduct electronic attacks. Which means there will always be a motive for law enforcement and intelligence to have a vested interest in them. Their strategy for this has changed over time. In past years, they were more visible, open and heavy handed in their approach. These days their strategy revolves more around misinformation and stealth.
Mixers can serve a useful purpose of enhancing privacy without delving into criminal territory of full blown money laundering afaik.
I doubt that. KYC would completely negate the purpose of using a mixer in the first place.
People have been known to receive ads related to topics they mentioned out loud or through texts on phones. Also ads indexed according to items they recently bought in stores. Etc. AFAIK there are extensive networks of data mining which ID people using cookies, email addresses and other seemingly innocuous methods of tracking. Registering an email on a bitcoin faucet or allowing cookie tracking might be considered forms of KYC. A mixer wouldn't necessarily require a full KYC check. It could only need to participate in whatever information gathering networks exist, while disabling anonymizing services.