Your analogy only works if it were possible to do that:

1) With a car without a VIN number / registration

2) With a car without a license plate

3) With no driver and no way to know who was controlling the car.

The point is, it’s not good to be able to commit serious crimes with zero risk of punishment.

The issue at debate is whether the gain from the legitimate (legal) use cases of technology like this outweigh the loss of making it easier for sex offenders / drug traffickers to more easily subvert authority.

The police have other ways of catching people doing crime. We don't need to give up all of our privacy and rights for them to do their job. If you think having privacy or rights stops the police from catching criminals then you are quite mistaken. If the police can catch el chapo and the rest of the drug cartel bosses then any other criminal can be taken down regardless of the technology they're using.

I would agree with you if the debate were “should we abolish SSL so we can MITM all internet traffic to catch more criminals?”

In that example, there is legitimate argument that SSL encrypted connections to more good than harm (it makes logging into your online bank possible on public Wifi, along with 1000’s of other examples like it).

But I’ve still yet to see a clear argument for absolute internet anonymity for anything that would benefit the average person (yet, I can think of dozens of ways it harms people).

It’s very likely that I’m just not aware of the legitimate (practical) use cases of TOR.

Anything the government knows about you COULD become (and in many nations, already are) a liability. Even things that are completely harmless.

On top of that, let's say that you do become a suspect of a crime you didn't commit. Every little shred of information that can be found is going to be used to paint a false narrative against you. Why would you want anybody to have ANY information on you at that point.

Surely you've heard of "the right to remain silent" and "pleading the 5th". Anonymity online is the internet version of that.

Sometimes the crime is pointing out that the police are violent thugs, or that your government is interring people in "reeducation" camps.

It's true that anonymity is a double-edged sword, but it's better than having no blade when one is wielded against you.

> But I’ve still yet to see a clear argument for absolute internet anonymity for anything that would benefit the average person (yet, I can think of dozens of ways it harms people).

anonymity doesn't make it impossible to be held accountable for your actions. people tend to (unintentionally) dox themselves without any outside help. what it does is make it a lot harder for law enforcement to catch people without specifically targeting them and investing resources.

I know you're an upstanding, respectable citizen who would never do anything illegal, but just think of privacy/anonymity as a hedge against that tiny chance that the government might actually make an unreasonable law.

There are over a billion people under a particular authoritarian regime that could potentially benefit from practical use of this technology.

> it makes logging into your online bank possible on public Wifi

It makes internet banking possible, period. Cleartext banking, in any public Internet context, would be simply unworkable.

I disagree, authentication is not tied to encryption at all.

Why would we care about the benefit of the average person? How is that even an argument? Like imagine forbidding to publish some books or music, because we somehow decided that they might not benefit the average person.

> I’ve still yet to see a clear argument for absolute internet anonymity for anything that would benefit the average person

Absolute anonymity should be the default. There is no need to justify it. It's the government that needs to justify it's need to know stuff about specific persons.

It is possible to deface or alter the VIN number, steal a license plate, and rig a car for remote control.

If you commit, or attempt mass murder this way, you'll probably be caught due to the amount of resources a law enforcement agency will spend investigating such a crime. If you put up an anonymous website distributing child pornography, but you're not the one producing it, law enforcement will spend several orders of magnitude less resources investigating that crime.

It's called an investigation and it worked for hundreds of years without the internet.

Exactly. A screwdriver and a file can make a deadly weapon, a piece of car tire inner tube paired with a Y-shaped piece of wood and a few bearing balls can make a slingshot capable of killing a person at distance. Bows and arrows are easy to build, and the necessary materials are easily obtainable in nature. If we restrict everything that can be used also to harm others, we'll end up needing a weapon permit just to enter a hardware store or take a walk in the park.

The counterargument to this is always what is the tool designed to do?

- Should the layperson be allowed to own weapons-grade plutonium?

- How about being able to buy and cultivate your own anthrax cultures?

- Why shouldn't I be able to spray DDT when it's super effective?

Sure, a screwdriver is design to screw, just as fentanyl is designed to kill pain, but in the hands of a bad actors they can cause different levels of harm.

I'm not saying Onionshare is good or bad, just that you need to step back at look at any tool and consider the net potential impact if bad actors are able to exploit it.

That's why I emphasized the "also"; one thing is a tool whose primary purpose is not to harm people but can be misused to do so, and a whole different thing is something which can only be used to hurt people or restrict their liberties.

"I'm not saying Onionshare is good or bad, just that you need to step back at look at any tool and consider the net potential impact if bad actors are able to exploit it."

True, and that's why we must think very carefully before enacting laws that make this or that tool illegal just because some criminal found a destructive use for it; there are so many things potentially dangerous in the wrong hands that blindly banning them all would either be impossible or would bring us back to stone age.

No, "designed to do" and "functions it can provide" are never the same.

You shouldn't limit smart people because some OEM is stupid and didn't think up an innovative use case when deciding and designing on the intended use of a product.

Let's not forget that unlike cars, data on the internet can not actually physically harm people. Especially for crimes with an overwhelming moral component such as sexual abuse, people seem to have a tendency to conflate someone deriving pleasure from pictures of the act with the actual act. (See also UN pushes against pornographic manga, where there has not even been an actual act)

Something feels wrong about this analogy. There is a difference between something that's designed to maim and something that could maim if it's misused.

I am not sure where Tor fits into that distinction, and I think that's the issue.

There are circulation codes and policemen watching the roads, trying to reduce reckless behaviour. How do you police and bring down misuse of onion sites for hideous crimes?

Well, for one thing, in order for the hideous crime to have real world impact it needs to by definition exist somewhere beyond just the onion site.

Otherwise it literally just is information.

Information can be harmful. For example, people who were raped as a child do not want footage of that rape distributed as a masturbation aid, and yet numerous dark web sites are dedicated to exactly this.

It reminds of how EU can order facebook to delete its posts for the entire world, because EU wants to control what other people outside of EU are allowed to see.

https://www.euractiv.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/10/...

They might not want it, but I do not see how it is harmful, it does not affect them at all after all. They could as well live their whole lives without knowing that their images are online. It is pretty similar to piracy if you think about it. Some people thinking they are entitled to dictate if and how certain numbers are used and distributed.

You are essentially advocating for a society without a right to privacy which while logically consistent is an extremist position not shared by the vast majority of people

I would consider a society in which you are not allowed to communicate with others without the government getting access to be one without a right to privacy. It's interesting how we can come to polar opposite conclusions about the implications of this technology.

(It seems that the difference may be in what exactly we consider to be a privacy violation. I would say that in the child-pornography case, the victim's privacy has been destroyed the moment the pictures have been observed and recorded by the abuser, and further reproduction is not a privacy violation because there is no privacy in the pictures left to violate. Since Tor and co. have no impact on the ability of a child pornographer to make the initial recording, they are an unalloyed good for privacy.)

> further reproduction is not a privacy violation because there is no privacy in the pictures left to violate

Is this honestly how you'd feel about footage of someone you know being raped?? It should not be illegal to distribute it...? Can you explain precisely what you think the law should be?

I don't know how you get that out of my post. Privacy violation is not the only grounds on which something may be illegal.

You just infiltrate the site and use social engineering to hack it. TOR site does not stop police from investigating and catching the people running the site.

no one employs perfect opsec at all times and all it takes is one small mistake. ross ulbricht (sill road guy) caught caught because of one silly forum post that linked his two identities.