[jboy55]

I think the point was that you aren't being "charged" with using Tor, you are being charged with buying drugs online. You have Tor installed and unfortunately a very small percentage of people have Tor installed. That might be enough to convince a jury, or be enough pressure for you to plead down to a lower crime to reduce that risk.

[AnthonyMouse]

There first has to be some actual evidence that you were buying drugs online. If the cops search you and find drugs, it isn't going to matter a lot one way or the other whether you have Tor installed.

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?

[jboy55]

Drugs are sent to you and intercepted. You claim, though your lawyer, someone was just using your house as a drop and you have no idea who ordered them. They get your computer, you have Tor installed. Prosecutor argues Tor is only used for CP and drugs. Is that enough to convict? Maybe.

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.

[AnthonyMouse]

The trouble is that the alternative is worse. They come to your house, you don't have Tor installed and then, because you haven't been using Tor, they pull your search history and trawl through it looking for things to take out of context.

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.

[jboy55]

Yes, all good. My point was that you aren't being charged with having Tor in the scenario that was described. The existence of Tor on your computer might work as connecting the user to a drug sale.

[AnthonyMouse]

And what I'm getting at is that in that circumstance, not using Tor is worse, because at that point they have a weak case but are now searching your residence to backfill their case with whatever circumstantial innuendo they can dredge up from a fishing expedition. If you've actually been using Tor then they get less of your browser history and are deprived of material to take out of context. Instead they're left with only the rhetorical argument you propose, which is still weak.