Tor veteran Lucky Green exits, torpedos critical 'Tonga' node and relays (The Register)

More likely he faced legal pressure and cannot disclose what is or face prosecution himself.

Gag orders are a common feature of the American legal system. Could be NSA letter, or could be actual court case. They could of pressured him into giving legal authorities access to his servers and his private keys and it would be a criminal act for him to disclose any of it. If it's not the USA legal system, then it can be one of many others. They are all pretty similar.

It's a severe mistake to speculate on his motivation because of this. Could be personal, could be legal, could be lack of interest. Who knows? You really can't.

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As far as child molesters go you are not 'creating' molesters by contributing to Tor. They exist and carry out their actions regardless of any networking technology.

And regarding positive vs negative outcomes it is important to remember that the number of crimes and severity of crimes committed by governments against their own citizens is significantly greater then all crimes committed by individuals against one another. When you combine that with crimes committed by governments against _other_ country's citizens then it is even worse.

http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/VIS.TEARS.ALL.AROUND.HTM

It is absolutely critical for the well being of mankind that individuals retain the ability to undermine the authorities of their own governments when necessary to prevent repeats of the 20th century. This is the only real control that people have over many governments. Technology enables repressive state regimes to improve their control and surveillance of their population. You need to have the ability to subvert that technology or have alternative technology that can undermine the ability for state actors to control, censor, and monitor. Without balance of power between individuals and the state the path to tyranny is virtually ensured.

While Tor in the west is arguably widely used for accessing and distributing child abuse material, the ways Tor is used varies wildly from political system to political system. While most Internet censorship isn't as sophisticated as China's Great Firewall, and mostly based on DNS blocks, Tor is still useful for human rights purposes. Tor allows human rights activists to hide their real location from somebody conducting targeted surveillance on them, as is often the case with political dissidents.

One could say that Tor enables paedophiles to communicate in a secure manner, but at the same time, it also enables political activists to do the same. Furthermore, as you can see from the very feature article you've linked, using Tor does not mean you're 100% safe, as operational security is key for staying anonymous.

Banning Tor (which China tried, unsuccessfully) is not going to change anything for the better. People with criminal intentions will still use applications for the purpose of staying undetected, while your everyday person faced with sudden political turmoil wanting to do activist work will suddenly be out of a way of doing so in a relatively secure manner, unless they have knowledge that they "shouldn't have" in the first place.

"Won't somebody think of the children" genuinely is the go-to example.

Over the past years the UK had what was sometimes called the "phone hacking scandal". Tabloid newspapers, mostly owned by one particular proprietor, systematically used a number of techniques, unsophisticated to a LWN.net reader but effective against the not-so-technical victims such as movie stars, politicians and sports personalities - to listen to private telephone conversations as a source of gossip and to confirm otherwise hard to prove elements of a story.

Prior to the criminal trial in which she was ultimately (and quite astoundingly) found not guilty, the editor of one of those tabloids was known to have colluded with a key member of her staff to conceal evidence of the extent and continuity of the activity. It was the company's position that "hacking" had been done only by a few "bad apples", without knowledge of their superiors. So concealing all evidence that it was in fact company policy was essential to keeping up appearances and thus reducing the number of furious victims they'd have to pay off.

Now, a reasonable person might think that the fact these two people (the editor and her colleague) were _sleeping together_ at the time, and were both cheating on partners was pertinent - if you're already lying about so much for the person you "love" why not also lie to police, to lawyers, to parliament itself? But their lawyers insisted that it was _completely unacceptable_ for this obviously pertinent information to be made public. Why? Because their already failing marriages had produced children, and those children would grow old enough to look in a newspaper archive and find out that mummy (or daddy) was sleeping with a work colleague. Scandalous! They'd be scarred for life. This must be suppressed.

That seems laughable doesn't it? But it suits _adults_ to pretend they need to protect children, in order to protect themselves. Doing evil is OK, but _telling people_ about evil is somehow worse, and we rush to invent excuses to suppress it. Hypocrisy is poisonous and Tor fights hypocrisy. If you find account of terrible things on Tor (or FreeNet, or in a sketchbook in grandpa's old trunk after he dies), either those things really happened, and it's the thing really happening you should really worry about, or else they're fiction and you should be pleased they're confined to a world that isn't real.

If our world really had dragons setting fire to farms and stealing treasure, I'd be all in favour of stopping them, killing them if necessary. But if such a world also had _stories_ of dragons and I found my government had decided the priority was to suppress the _stories_ while allowing the fires and thefts to continue largely unabated, that would worry me. It should worry you.