It’s really not. You’ve been asserting that there’s somehow a lack of security because they don’t support tor because that means they’re failing on the “availability” point of the CIA triad. That’s incorrect.

Before you can claim it’s not a red herring, you must first grasp what is claimed as the red herring. Your reply displays that you don’t. When a demographic of people are wholly denied availability, and you make the false assertion that availability is /never/ binary, it’s both incorrect and irrelevant. Incorrect because you can have 100% loss of availability in a context. Context is important. And it’s incorrect because people without access are inherently without availability.

This is also incorrect. The scope is the American taxpayer who is able and willing to utilize the website. You are either unable or unwilling. You are not in the scope.

THAT’s incorrect. That’s the sort of weasel wording that people can see right through. You’ve taken the whole of taxpayers who are entitled (in fact obligated) to file tax, and excluded some of them as a consequence of infosec incompetence. You cannot redefine the meaning of a term to justify incompetence. It’s purpose defeating for PR damage control.

You absolutely can block entire swaths of address ranges and, in fact, have better security because you did so.

This is where your lack of infosec background clearly exposes itself. You can also /randomly/ block large swaths of people arbitrarily and with the same mentality claim “better security” because you think a baddy likely got blocked, a claim that inherently requires disregarding availability as a security factor. You will fool people with that as you’re pushing a common malpractice in security which persists in countless access scenarios because availaibility to the excluded is disregarded by the naive and unwitting.

A lot has changed from decades ago, you might consider going back to school.

Nonsense. Infosec, comp sci, and all tech disciplines cover most diligently principles and theory which are resilient over decades, not tool-specific disposable knowledge. The principles and theories have not changed in the past 20 years. You seem to be in a program that short-cuts the principles and fixates on disposable knowlege, likely a vocational / boot camp type of school, in which case you should consider transferring to a school that gives more coverage on theory - the kind of knowledge that doesn’t age so fast.

Neither is tor. And even if tor did provide perfect anonymity, tough shit.

WTF? You don’t know how Tor works. Perfection is never on the table in the infosec practice. You should forget about perfection -- it’s distracting you. But Tor most certainly provides anonymity in the face of countless threat agents, among other features.

Nobody owes you the ability to “anonymously” download tax material at your preferred comfort level of anonymity.

“Owes” implies a debt. I never spoke of owing or debts. The IRS has an obligation to inform the public. When they exclude demographics of people from their service (in particular people who funded them), it’s an infosec failure and an injustice.