> That statement is not exactly true in the case of that Harvard kid. A sysadmin and their logs is still "watching", and in this case eventually found out which site through news channels ;).

That's why bridges and pluggable transports exist and let you obfuscate your Tor traffic to look like something else, see: https://tb-manual.torproject.org/en-US/circumvention.html

> That's not to say that I think Tor isn't great nor that it shouldn't be used. My complaint is that it gets represented to general non-technical crowds as solving more problems than it actually does.

Well they do provide warnings https://www.torproject.org/download/download.html.en#warning among them is the one which is related to the Harvard teen "Use bridges and/or find company: Tor tries to prevent attackers from learning what destination websites you connect to. However, by default, it does not prevent somebody watching your Internet traffic from learning that you're using Tor. If this matters to you, you can reduce this risk by configuring Tor to use a Tor bridge relay rather than connecting directly to the public Tor network. Ultimately the best protection is a social approach: the more Tor users there are near you and the more diverse their interests, the less dangerous it will be that you are one of them. Convince other people to use Tor, too! "