I haven't played with Tor in several years. It was obvious to me long before CM cracked it that there were / are a lot of major issues with it.
Here is my strategy for dealing with those issues, for good or ill. (Other sec minded folks please pick this apart if you find holes.)
This strategy combines both tech and real world techniques.
1) Create an obfuscated identity. And I'm not talking about ID theft. Google it. There's a lot to it. Personally, my first step was to purchase, with cash, a reloadable card at a wally world 1500 miles from my home while visiting my sister-in-law then jumping through a couple of dozen hoops to create a hard (but not impossible) to follow money trail.
(Note this step has been rendered irrelevant by the advent of bitcoin. Unless you want to be ultra, completely knackers beyond clinically paranoid and use that ID to set up BC.)
2) Use the obfuscated ID to pay for hosting a vt VPN instance in a country w/ much stronger privacy laws than the US. (If you already live in one of those then still put your VPN in another country for legal reasons.) Build the VPN appliance yourself so that you actually know what's in it. And wrap the connection in an SSL tunnel so that to your ISP it just looks like you're logging in to a web site inside the hosted IP block.
3) Connect to the VPN before connecting to Tor. If they trace you back to that IP they have to go through both legal and technical hurdles to get the info on your obfuscated identity and then go through whatever hurdles you laid out there before they actually find you. And of course, using basic Tor sec as has already been mentioned.
4) To speed up your Tor connection follow a tut like this
one. It's been years since I've dinked with this and I can't find the exact tut I used. But the idea was similar.
5) Then to make it harder to track me back from the destination to Tor I used multiple random pathway
chained proxys that chained 8 random proxies after each of the 8 exit nodes. (It was relatively fast, all things considered. Even with the chains it was faster than exiting a single node.)
Tada!
It wasn't completely unbustable. Nothing is. But it was the most secure scenario I could come up with. (Any body see any gaping holes that I should be spanked for?)
Of course with the advent of IPv5 exploits all of that may be completely superfluous now. But I can't say for sure yet. I only found out they even existed a few days ago.
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EDIT:
Like I said, I haven't played with this in a while, I forgot a step above.
Before connecting to the VPN connect to proxy in a randomized pool; preferably never the same one twice and the most secure with the least logging you can find and never transparent ones. That way if they track you back to your VPN the logs from the host won't show your IP and they'll have to go through legal / investigatory measures to crack your obfuscated identity.
And, of course, if you ever drop your shields, even once, you're busted. That's how they got Sabu.
