Re: [tor-talk] Use of TOR for illegal activities

["ncl@xxxxxxx" <ncl@xxxxxxx>]

Paul A. Crable:
> Is there some way to keep TOR out of the hands of sleazebags and
> crooks?


No. The entire point is that no one is censored. To allow some form of
censorship would only put pressure to allow even more censorship with
time, and trust and anonyminity would be broken.

As can be seen by several of the busts you may have heard of,
authorities can still catch "the bad guys" because they will eventually
mess up, and get be revealed.

Around 18:30 of Cypherpunks Part 2[1] Appelbaum even makes the argument
that removing things like child abuse material don't help the problem,
and may even worsen it.



> This ties in somewhat to a recent posting on this list claiming that 
> 2/3's of the activity on TOR is involved in pornography.

I assume from the context of illegal activity that by pornography you're
talking about child abuse material (ie "child pornography")

There was a study that said a majority of /Hidden Services lookups/
seemed to point to child-abuse-related .onions, there are some
confusions on how this information can be taken though.

Dr. Gareth Owen explains this a bit in his 31C3 talk[2] If you don't
have the time to watch it, it basically boils down to (iirc):
 a) HS traffic can't be directly calculated, you can only guess based
    on estimated of how many times its address was looked up
 b) anti-crime/anti-abuse are known to scrape onions in order to conduct
    investigations and gather hints, which may account for part of those
    high lookup counts.
 c) This is only Hidden Service traffic, which when compared to the the
    rest of Tor traffic, is about 1.5%[3]

So no, 80 Percent of Tor Traffic Is Not Child Porn.[4]


[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aitQ2XTaUVM
[2]
https://cdn.media.ccc.de/congress/2014/webm-hd/31c3-6112-en-de-Tor_Hidden_Services_and_Deanonymisation_webm-hd.webm
[3]
https://blog.torproject.org/blog/tor-80-percent-percent-1-2-percent-abusive
[4]
http://www.wired.com/2015/01/department-justice-80-percent-tor-traffic-child-porn/
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