After all, some of the most central non-hidden-service applications of Tor are to enable Internet users in countries like China and Iran to evade their governments' online repression, and even allowing US intelligence and law enforcement to gather data online without detection. And sites visited through Tor2Web, a tool designed to make Tor hidden services more accessible to non-anonymous users, would be underrepresented, shifting more of the findings towards sites whose content requires strong anonymity.īut none of those possible fudges in the study comes close to the one Caldwell made in her statements Tuesday, conflating Tor hidden services with Tor itself. Unstable sites that frequently go offline might generate more visit counts in the study's methodology. Hackers sometimes launch floods of fraudulent traffic at the sites with the aim of taking them offline. The Tor Project also identified numerous caveats that might have led to the over-representation of pedophilia sites in the study's findings: Law enforcement and anti-abuse organizations often visit child porn sites to track and infiltrate them.
“We understand 80 percent of traffic on the Tor network involves child pornography.” “Tor obviously was created with good intentions, but it’s a huge problem for law enforcement,” Caldwell said in comments reported by Motherboard and confirmed to me by others who attended the conference. And as an example of the grave risks presented by that privacy, she cited a study she said claimed an overwhelming majority of Tor's anonymous traffic relates to pedophilia. Her statements are the latest in a growing drumbeat of federal criticism of tech companies and software projects that provide privacy and anonymity at the expense of surveillance. It doesn't need the US government making up bogus statistics about how much that anonymity facilitates child pornography.Īt the State of the Net conference in Washington on Tuesday, US assistant attorney general Leslie Caldwell discussed what she described as the dangers of encryption and cryptographic anonymity tools like Tor, and how those tools can hamper law enforcement. The debate over online anonymity, and all the whistleblowers, trolls, anarchists, journalists and political dissidents it enables, is messy enough.
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