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Author here. I thought of it as "is one person escaping an authoritarian regime to communicate freely worth more or less than ten people buying drugs?". A criminal will always find another way to engage in criminal activities, but can a news reporter or activist find another safe way to communicate? I felt as though the benefits to users using tor for legitimate purposes, outweighed the users who used tor maliciously.

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I'd be less concerned about drugs and more about human trafficking or child pornography.

Purely speculation but I strongly suspect the subset of malicious tor users engaging in child pornography and human trafficking is extremely, extremely small. The largest group of malicious users is most likely drug and cybercrime related. Is it worth decrying tor as a heaven for pedophiles or human traffickers if they make up a negligible number of users? If so, the same could easily be said about bitcoin or any other decentralised cryptocurrency. The benefits given to journalists, activists, or any individual who wants anonymity for the sake of pricacy is worth more, to me, than maybe helping a negligible number of users. Further, those malicious users would likely find another way to engage in their activities but could the legitimate users?

There are a bunch of similar projects where such people could (and likely already are) move: I2P, Freenet, GNUnet, and probably some others. So closing (or not supporting) Tor just because some bad actors are there is pointless. Every tool can be used for both good and bad things.

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