The dark web's main browser helps pedophile networks flourish, experts say
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
As the author admits, there's lots of good interests in keeping Tor a thing, and nothing good can come out from removing it.
Such people sharing illicit material should be investigated and prosecuted (with severe and appropriate court orders) through the ordinary means, but the author doesn't seem to have a good solution on hand, other than showing provocative questions like "why are we funding these Tor guys".
There's no single solution that they can implement TOR-side without breaking the whole point of the project. They won't implement any backdoor or similar bullshit, no matter what. There's no point in TOR if they do that. May as well disband the project.
But the basic gist is that people were selling illicit sex services on these websites, much of which was very unsavory. So there was a big push to make these websites liable for users engaging in that sort of communications.
It succeeded and these websites shutdown the services these people were using, which in turn destroyed or otherwise undermined numerous investigations going on all around the country to prosecute these criminals.
On a side note when people operate privaty-ran "to catch a predator" sting operations in the USA... One particularly successful group was asked why all their targets tend to be from more conservative leaning parts of the country. The non-obvious answer to that is that in many other places around they country they don't bother because they can't get the police to show up and arrest the people they find.
So when you have certain governments refusing to even investigate sexual crimes involving minors that they have happening in their own communities it seems to be a bit disingenuous when they claim they need to eliminate privacy to go after much more difficult targets on the internet.
The exact same thing is true of the US Government: "Bad people are doing bad things behind closed doors. By legalizing privacy in homes (and elsewhere) the United States is enabling bad people to do horrible things."
It is absolutely true that society can stop almost all crime if we would give up our collective rights to privacy.
If the latter, they'll be the ones committing crimes at this point. Not everyone, but some of them. Every large enough subset of humans contains people that will commit crimes at some point and I don't want them to have full power and accessibility on my entire life without a warrant.