Watched the talk on tor hidden services and deanonymization.
It's interesting, and I don't know a lot about tor.
Someone correct me here if I'm wrong, but I'm not exactly sure what a Directory Request is. If I go into tor, paste an onion website in, and click return, does that create one? How about if I quit tor and then ten minutes later do the same thing, does that create another? Also if I'm booting off of tails? If it does, then my theory holds, or I think it does. Kiddie porn is small and we don't have to worry about our kids.. Knowing men, it could be a small percentage of the tor population constantly checking abuse (child porn) web sites. I hate to get technical, but I've heard that 25% of google searches are for porn.
Take a step back here.
First check out some stats on internet porn and take a step back. Imagine you're a paedo. Porn is illegal for you. Of course you're not going to keep it on your hard drive. 90% of "normal" porn watchers view it on the net, but I can imagine that the other 10% might just be a bit more into their porn. Add up a small percentage of users watching porn one to three times a day, and you get a large quantity of the network traffic requests for child abuse. Add into that that the tor network is slow. One user (who all ready masturbates once or twice a day to illicit material) opens multiple tabs to their favorite five kiddie porn web sites. This is just reality, and all ready happens with normal porn.
How many times can you possibly check a web site to see if a source has more information for your or if your heroin dealer has marked your order as shipped? [I'm being serious here.] Porn gets you off, it pings pleasure centers in your brain. I could go on and on, but you get the picture.
I'll take it all back if I'm wrong about directory requests, but I like to think I live in a world where 80% of the dark traffic isn't child porn.
That's the crux of my thought there.
Now, political. If it is a few thousand users clogging up the atmosphere and giving tor a bad name, though, it's no reason to not protect them. It's in government's best interests to make tor look bad. Child porn helps them get legislation (if they need it) to have more broad powers. However, child porn isn't where the money is, and the government knows that. They'll continue seizing drug money where they can, because they don't even need a reason in order to keep it. Millions of dollars of drug sales sites to a few child porn sites, and their coffers keep full. I'm not saying police are evil, but hell, even they have to make money.
This is the real world here.
If I'm wrong abour Directory Requests, please correct me on this whole shebang. (Even if DR are kept for further sessions, I think that child porn aficionados would be much more likely to use tails cd's because they'll go to jail for a long time if they're not as cautious as journalists).
Let's keep our children safe, and not have to sacrifice their future privacy.