
80 Percent of Tor Traffic Is Not Child Porn - Libertatea
http://www.wired.com/2015/01/department-justice-80-percent-tor-traffic-child-porn/
======
binarymax
The claim is nothing more than propaganda. The DOJ knows the truth, and the
people who are part of the technical community know the truth.

Saying this is just using false information to sway the public, and looking to
badge things that are just tools as inherently evil tools, or tools only used
for evil.

Disclaiming the lie is a good step - but I'd like to see the rebuttal coming
from a more mainstream media source. Wired writing this article is preaching
to the choir.

~~~
dangerlibrary
Having worked with attorneys (including some at the DOJ), I would advise you
not to overestimate their understanding of technical concepts.

~~~
mike_hearn
The source of the confusion here is obvious and pounding on it won't help.
From the DoJ's perspective Tor _is_ hidden services. Criminal abuse enabled by
proxying to the open web is not high up on their radar. Regular web sites can
easily block Tor. But hidden services are unique. When Tor is mentioned in the
media, it's almost always because of hidden services. When it's involved in
large scale FBI investigations, it's almost always because of hidden services.

So whilst Andy Greenberg's article is correct, it's correct in a nitpicky
technical sense that isn't going to have any political impact as an argument.
Tor has chosen to support hidden services very strongly, so the fact that it's
a relatively small amount of their total traffic doesn't matter much.

The Tor project _needs_ to take this kind of thing seriously. Alarm bells
should be ringing. They are getting (apparently credible?) tipoffs about plans
to seize directory authorities. Relays actually are getting seized. DoJ
officials are publicly saying they perceive Tor as being dominated by crime.
Meanwhile they are doubling down and making blog posts that describe police
operations as "attacks". This has the feeling of a slow motion train wreck in
the making.

~~~
jMyles
> that describe police operations as "attacks"

Is there a more reasonable way to describe "police operations" whose goal is
to disable portions of or function of a network?

~~~
TylerJay
Good point. It _is_ the standard term in security and cryptography.

~~~
schmitosis
It doesn't matter. You can't use in-group specialized vocabulary when talking
to out-group audiences. You must either use common vernacular or somehow give
new, commonly accepted definitions to the words you want to use.

~~~
jMyles
I don't think "attack" is specialized vocabulary meant for an in-crowd.

For reasonable, common definitions of "attack," seeking to disable something
or cause it to malfunction is an attack against that thing.

------
tempestn
Did anyone else initially read this title as implying that 20% of Tor traffic
IS child porn?

Edit in case it's changed: The title is, "80 Percent of Tor Traffic Is Not
Child Porn."

~~~
andrewstuart2
Unsurprisingly, the original title, "No, Department of Justice, 80 Percent of
Tor Traffic Is Not Child Porn," is quite a bit clearer.

~~~
chadscira
What about the actual url...

`/department-justice-80-percent-tor-traffic-child-porn`

------
orthecreedence
The internet community as a whole is going to have an uphill battle against
telecoms, spy organizations, and law enforcement agencies ...probably forever.

I hope that at some point John Q Public realizes that digital privacy and free
flow of information are more akin to advancing society scientifically and
spiritually much more so than terrorism, child porn, human/drug/weapon
trafficking, et al.

After the Snowden revelations it was quite apparent that the average citizen
would gladly exchange a lot of privacy in order to fight an enemy that doesn't
exist.

I hope we can stop going to war with ghosts and focus on moving society
forward. An open internet can be a great tool for this.

~~~
kevin_thibedeau
The average citizen doesn't care as long as they get their bread and circuses.

~~~
orthecreedence
Well the average citizen cares about certain things such as "jobs are good" or
"terrorists are bad" where they don't necessarily _care_ but they at least
make associations with certain topics. I guess I hope that privacy/open
internet will become one of those simple things people can understand.

------
sp332
_I made clear at the time that the study claimed 80 percent of traffic to Tor
hidden services related to child pornography, not 80 percent of all Tor
traffic._

This is also a bogus number. An estimated 80% of Tor hidden service _directory
lookups_ are for those sites. Long-lived connections only make one lookup, and
sites that people check multiple times in one session only get looked up
periodically. The ones that are looked up the most often are the ones where
people open Tor, visit the site, then close Tor. This does not correlate with
volume of Tor traffic at all.

~~~
Sprint
It probably correlates really well with random research projects that are
tracking those hidden services...

~~~
mirimir
It is only natural that people with things to hide will be overrepresented
among early adopters of technologies for hiding things. The solution isn't to
weaken hidden services, so that evil can be more readily exposed. Far more
useful will be increasing the accessibility and usability of hidden services
for protecting human rights. In this case, dilution is truly the solution.

------
crispy2000
And while we're discussing it, 80% of people carrying cash are not drug
smugglers, and 80% of people using Waze to watch for traffic cops are not cop-
killers. Are we seeing a trend here?

~~~
dangerlibrary
Wait, is that actually a criticism levelled against Waze? That can't possibly
stick, right?

Almost everyone in the U.S. drives and everyone who drives hates getting
traffic tickets. I thought allegations/criticisms like these only really
worked when you could separate the users into some group identified as
"other".

~~~
howeyc
Yes that is a real criticism against Waze. The thought is that the "show where
the cops are" feature can be used by those who wish to assassinate cops (by
finding them when they are alone I guess).

The obvious conclusion being that the feature must be removed (obvious to a
certain Orange country sheriff at least). [http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-
way/2015/01/28/382013185/off...](http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-
way/2015/01/28/382013185/officers-ask-map-app-to-remove-police-tracking)

~~~
simias
That's not saying that "80% of Waze users are cop killers" though. Just that
some people could use it to locate cops in order to attack them.

I don't know if that makes really sense but it's much less outrageous than
what the OP implied.

~~~
JelteF
I think what the OP implied is that things will always be used by criminals
for other purposes than intended.

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logfromblammo
Wouldn't you have to decrypt and inspect all Tor traffic to accurately
determine what percentage of it is _anything_?

If the DoJ could do that, they would necessarily have the ability to track and
capture the CP-traffickers without bothering to "inform" the news media that
such people are crawling all over Tor, _in your Internet pipes, coming to get
your children_.

CP is such a universally reviled thing that whenever someone brings it up in
an unrelated argument, I automatically suspect that they are losing it, they
know it, and they are falling back to rhetoric. It is the "won't someone
please think of the children" appeal to emotion, turned up to 11.

------
api
How would anyone really know? Isn't the point of Tor to make that kind of
study damn near impossible? For all we know 80% of Tor traffic is hot sexy
manatee action.

~~~
drzaiusapelord
Unencrypted data passing through an exit node can be read by the operator of
the node. Deploy x amount of nodes, analyze traffic and perform some basic
statistical analysis?

Granted your data will be biased towards unencrypted traffic, but you should
get a small picture of whats going on. Plain jane http and ftp traffic should
be sniffable.

~~~
wahsd
There is no amount of statistical analysis that you could do to extrapolate
the amount of traffic with anything even approaching accuracy. I also have
approaching zero confidence that any government agency or even a contractor
funded by the government would be able to approach adequate methods to allow
even an attempt at statistical analysis.

The "small picture" you would get, is very well probably the 80% we are
talking about, e.g., 80% of all traffic that is associated with kiddie porn
and is also unencrypted because the perpetrators are unsophisticated is actual
kiddie porn traffic, which says nothing whatsoever about the overall amount of
traffic that is kiddie porn. On top of that, what are we talking about here?
What is this definition of o kiddie porn? Does that number include subjects
that "appear" to be underage? If I know anything, I know that the government
will skew numbers to fool others and even themselves; because that's how you
get money and how you build your little fiefdom.

------
ingler
At this point, it's not outside the realm of possibility that some or many of
the hidden services are being run by three letter agencies themselves.

~~~
mturmon
These agencies used fronts to donate money to cold war cultural institutions.
I think your speculation is entirely possible, even though it sounds tinfoil-
hattish now.

The Cold War example that comes to mind is _Partisan Review_ , a broadly left-
oriented journal that published Susan Sontag's "Notes on Camp" and Clement
Greenberg's highly influential art essays
([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partisan_Review#Funding_by_the_...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partisan_Review#Funding_by_the_C.I.A.)),
which (it was later found) accepted multiple donations from CIA fronts.

As time went on, some viewed these donations as a tool these agencies found to
bolster the intellectual stature of the "New York School" of heroic AbEx
painters versus their Soviet counterparts
([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abstract_expressionism#Abstract...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abstract_expressionism#Abstract_expressionism_and_the_Cold_War)).

------
moe
Has anyone actually _seen_ that "study" from Portsmouth University?

I tried to google it but all I get is useless soundbites and fear-mongering,
all over the mainstream media, with everyone linking back to Wired.com.

No one links to the actual study or to any evidence to support the claim.

Shame on you Wired.

~~~
mikeyouse
The statistic comes from a talk at this year's 31C3 In Germany and was
delivered by a professor from the University of Portsmouth -- Dr. Gareth Owen.

His personal site:
[https://ghowen.me/other.html](https://ghowen.me/other.html)

And a direct link to the video:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oZdeRmlj8Gw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oZdeRmlj8Gw)

I'd imagine he'll publish a full write-up soon but the talk was only a few
weeks ago so il not surprised it's not out yet.

------
madsravn
How do we know how big a percentage of Tor traffic is child porn? Who logs
that traffic?

Also, this is definitely one of the reason I can't see myself using Tor. If I
were to be a proxy for something like this :(

------
crystaln
While the DOJ should, but probably won't, correct it self, and should have
gotten it right the first time, Andy Greenburg deserves a significant amount
of fault for this misinformation. Both articles use somewhat ambiguous
language, and have titles that are unclear.

The most important distinction is between "Dark Web" and "Tor". A reader not
intimately familiar with Tor could easily assume that those are used
interchangeably.

------
totony
How would it be relevent even if it was? You either accept the fact people are
free or you don't. Whatever is your judgement on a specific topic should not
matter when talking about tor. Be it child porn, human traficking, banned
journalism.

Why would US's judgement against child porn be better than <insert a
country>'s judgement on journalism.

------
mcphilip
I've heard it said that the way to win a debate is to show the opposing
position ultimately leads to genocide, nuclear war, or child pornography. It's
depressing to witness the government's fear momgering reach its nadir.

------
chikun
Beware. This is how they shut down Usenet.

------
splintercell
Who writes these headlines? 80% of the TOR traffic is not-child porn, so only
75% is? Shouldn't the headline mention how much of it is child porn(its close
to 1%, from the article).

~~~
sp332
Usually it's an editor, not the author, who picks headlines. Some sites even
A/B test their headlines to see which gets more clicks.

