The title of this Wired article is somewhat over the top. It is about a (then) upcoming Gareth Owen's presentation on 31C3.

I just watched it [1] yesterday, and Gareth Owen himself says that this number is the count of a certain kind of hidden service request that should not be confused with "visits" or "visitors", for a number of reasons. The main ones I remember are:

- The specific kind of request measured is the first step towards connecting to the service, but may not always represent a complete connection that can be mapped to a individual

- Various anti-childporn organizations crawl the dark web constantly searching and indexing child pornography hidden services

[1] http://media.ccc.de/browse/congress/2014/31c3_-_6112_-_en_-_...

A more accurate analogy would compare it to DNS requests instead of visits. I don't know that there's any scientific research out there correlating percentages of DNS requests to visiting a website. That said, it's not an unreasonable assumption that the overwhelming majority of requests for any given domain hosting a web server are for actual users to fetch the content hosted there.

And over 70% of emails are spam[1], so we should route every email we send through the FBI/NSA?

That other 20% of Tor usage may very well be political dissidents, whistleblowers, or average Joes that just don't want half the world watching everything they do and say online.

[1] http://www.kaspersky.com/about/news/spam/2013/Spam_in_Q2_201...

"That other 20% of Tor usage may very well be political dissidents, whistleblowers, or average Joes that just don't want half the world watching everything they do and say online."

Or me, browsing my local government website to check when the next recycling pickup day is. Because I feel some kind of duty to do my bit to make the entirely innocent portion of the haystack bigger...

Two points. First, the comparison of spam to child pornography is a bit... lopsided. Second, every email we send is made available to the FBI/NSA already.

That's a terrible comparison.

Under a very uncertain traffic measurement methodology which plausibly biases towards very evanescent .onion addresses.

Over 90% of public roads service drunk drivers, drug dealers and most known and unknown criminals.

All users of such roads should be searchable at any given moment.

Your analogy would be more apt if the poster said '90% of nodes in the tor network routed child pornography'.

If it is true that 80% of hidden service visits are for child porn, then that would be more akin to saying 'X% of cars on the highways of america are drunk drivers or drug dealers'

This is unfunny because it is in practice true that any motorist can be searched at any time for any (or no) reason in the United States.