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Comment by bsamuels | Hacker News Reader

do you feel the same way about Tor?

If 99% of Tor's volume is helping laundering international drug trade money, distributing CSAM, etc, should it be demonized as well?

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I think most people do feel that way about Tor, both in terms of assuming that 99% of its users are criminals and that it should be demonized. It's interesting to me because I think most of those people don't feel the same way about encryption in general, which of course enables Tor and all sorts of criminal activity in other contexts. Everyone has something to hide from someone and wants to see the green lock symbol in their browser's address bar along with other assurances of some degree of privacy. I don't know how most people decide where to draw a line.

There are some things that are perfectly legal for me to Google search, that I don’t want my ISP or Google to know about. So Tor works well for that. Tor would also be useful if governments were to crack down on free speech.

You can apply basically the same argument to money. If I have $20m in Bitcoin I don’t want my name to be tied to my wallet address (because a KYC exchange saw where the money went to) because it makes me a target, for example. And in the case of censorship or something I want to be able to do with the money what I please.

Privacy is a fundamental human right, in my opinion. We have to use cumbersome technology to get any modicum of true digital privacy. Just because people use it for illegal things doesn’t mean that the desire for privacy or the technology itself is bad. One day things we find morally just may be illegal too

Intentional consealment of illegal internet traffic isn't a crime (the crime is just the crime).

Intentional consealment of illegal financial transactions is a crime in-and-of itself (the crime is money laundering, which is a seperate offence to the original criminal activity that the money came from).

The point was whether using a mixer is a crime in itself.

Well it is a crime to use it for obscuring illegal money, while it is not illegal to use Tor for obscuring illegal internet traffic

conspiracy to commit a crime is often an additional charge (IANAL)

That’s just when two or more people get together to plan a crime - obfuscation isn’t the offence, the offence is the joint planning and intention to commit a crime.

> If 99% of Tor's volume is helping laundering international drug trade money, distributing CSAM, etc, should it be demonized as well?

Easy answer: Yes! Although I think it would be hard to call it demonizing when something is already 99% demons.

Should any tech that conceals IP addresses be demonized? Or just Tor?

Obviously you know that "demonized" is a loaded word here. What's your point in using it?

All I'm saying is that if there's something where "99% of [...] volume is helping laundering international drug trade money, distributing CSAM" that that is obviously terrible for the world and we should be asking some strong questions about who's supporting it and why. Is somebody gaining something that's more important than the lives forever ruined?

Depends if it is being overwhelmingly used for criminal activity.

Mostly, yes. I sympathize with the goals in theory since I grew up on 90s internet dreams too but as a practical matter if you run a large website you’ll see mostly attacks from Tor, it shows up a lot in news about crime, and it’s noticeably helping people in actual repressive regimes because it’s still too easy to identify the network traffic when the stakes are high.

There's a difference between sending around uncensored information, and sending around uncensored money.

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