You don't do something, once, and then are good to go forever. Banks don't just put cash in a safe and forget about it; they have audits, security guards, cameras, threat intelligence profiling criminal gangs, etc.
For instance, for buying drugs, the ordering isn't the risky bit. Receiving it in the mail is. Even if tor was magically "100% safe" the crime overall wouldn't be. The point of using tor is not to eliminate all risk, it's just to decouple payment from reception. I had my drugs intercepted by customs once, but they couldn't prove I ordered them, so they dropped the case. I'm sure it might've been possible for them to prove it if they spent a lot of resources trying to trace crypto transfers and so on, but police only do that if the fish is big enough because they're resource constrained.
Tor is just another tool criminals can use to reduce risk. It's not perfect, but for most things it's the best thing available.
As opposed to... people who undergo illegal activities with the intention to BE caught???
An analog crime I think about is the murders in Moscow, Idaho. The criminal did take some careful measures like wearing gloves but he left a knife sheath behind that contained DNA evidence. Everything else they had on him was circumstantial, he owned a similar car to what police thought they saw on people's doorbell cameras and his phone went offline during the time of the murders and also pinged a tower close to the crime scene hours afterwards. Police found a partial genealogy match to his DNA which I'm sure they compared to similar car owners and cell tower records. If he hadn't left the sheath behind, wore something like a Tyvek suit, and simply left his phone at home, the suspect pool would have likely been too large. His careful measures (turning off his phone, making multiple passes in his car) likely contributed to police focusing on him once the DNA proved a link.
Nope. Not even that is 100% safe because you can be falsely convicted of a crime you never even committed. Many privacy tools reduce that risk as well, because you're less likely to be convicted by e.g. a lazy prosecutor willing to take things out of context if you provide them with less source material to trawl through.
If you weren't actually buying drugs online then there shouldn't be any evidence that you were (or the cops planted it and then we're back to it not really mattering whether you have Tor installed). And then what are they charging you with that would even make it to a jury instead of being dismissed by the judge for lack of evidence?
If Tor was ubiquitous obviously not, but its very niche, and looking at a chart of use, its pretty much only used for drugs and CP. There are privacy use cases, but just like using crypto as a currency and not a speculative gambling investment, its in the small minority of uses.
Why did you do multiple searches for std::vector? Are you worried about sharing needles? You also read an article about caffeine, which is often used as a cutting agent. You've been participating in internet discussions about using Tor, which the prosecutor argues is only used for CP and drugs.
> If Tor was ubiquitous obviously not, but its very niche, and looking at a chart of use, its pretty much only used for drugs and CP.
Nobody really knows what Tor is used for, by design. But the media likes to rile people up, and "Tor used by privacy activists to read Facebook" isn't a headline that does that.
It's all too easy to lie with statistics. For example, some people have looked at which hidden services are most often looked up. That's not going to tell you about real usage, because bots do lookups at a much faster rate than real people, and government agencies run automated crawlers. Then you get statistics that say a significant percentage of the lookups are for CP and drugs, but not what percentage of those lookups were made by law enforcement running crawlers 24/7 specifically looking for CP and drugs.
Here's another example:
https://www.sciencealert.com/only-a-small-fraction-of-the-da...
> "In countries coded as 'free', the percentage of users visiting Onion/Hidden Services as a proportion of total daily Tor use is nearly twice as much or ~7.8 percent."
> In other words, people living in liberal democracies are more likely to exploit the dark web for malicious purposes, whereas users living under repressive regimes in non-democratic countries might be more likely to use Tor to circumvent local censorship restrictions and access free information on the internet.
Tor is used to bypass censorship. This use case happens more often in countries where there is censorship, and less often in countries where there isn't, because obviously. Reaching from there to "people living in liberal democracies are more likely to exploit the dark web for malicious purposes" is ridiculous. A higher ratio of B to A because of a smaller need for A does not imply a greater occurrence of B.
That's so exceptionally unlikely as to be something you can discount as a possibility, providing you don't actually commit crimes.