Detecting TOR traffic is trivial for state actors who control their local infrastructure. In the PRC, TOR usage is banned and the ban is enforced via packet inspection.
In any nation likely to target residents in the manners you have proposed, using TOR for any appreciable length of time puts a more prominent target on their backs than walking around with a pride flag sewn onto your jacket.
And fingerprinting TOR usage via deep packet inspection is the fancy-pants way of doing it. Many nations like Ethiopia, Kazakstan, China, and Iran also just prevent routing to known TOR exit nodes-- and they're all known.
Meanwhile TOR is like "just use a proxy brah", seemingly completely unaware that proxy usage is also detectable and that giving advice like that to vulnerable persons in unsafe countries is dangerous to those persons.
So then you get to the "Swiss cheese model" of disaster prevention where in order to safely use TOR you have to use it through a VPN that you connect to through a proxy (all of which is STILL detectable) and any mistake along the way due to not being absolutely and completely perfect in the configuration or usage of TOR will put you at risk of automated detection.
edit: you also, as a vulnerable user in an unsafe country who may not have consistent access to the internet or even speak English, must be stringently up-to-date on the software versions (e.g. the Ricochet vulnerability) of every product used in the TOR chain, which seems... unreasonable.
In any nation likely to target residents in the manners you have proposed, using TOR for any appreciable length of time puts a more prominent target on their backs than walking around with a pride flag sewn onto your jacket.
And fingerprinting TOR usage via deep packet inspection is the fancy-pants way of doing it. Many nations like Ethiopia, Kazakstan, China, and Iran also just prevent routing to known TOR exit nodes-- and they're all known.
Meanwhile TOR is like "just use a proxy brah", seemingly completely unaware that proxy usage is also detectable and that giving advice like that to vulnerable persons in unsafe countries is dangerous to those persons.
So then you get to the "Swiss cheese model" of disaster prevention where in order to safely use TOR you have to use it through a VPN that you connect to through a proxy (all of which is STILL detectable) and any mistake along the way due to not being absolutely and completely perfect in the configuration or usage of TOR will put you at risk of automated detection.
edit: you also, as a vulnerable user in an unsafe country who may not have consistent access to the internet or even speak English, must be stringently up-to-date on the software versions (e.g. the Ricochet vulnerability) of every product used in the TOR chain, which seems... unreasonable.