> I wouldn't be surprised if Tor was a honey pot designed to catch people doing nefarious things. So far, the high profile busts involving Tor all involve some

> I wouldn't be surprised if Tor was a honey pot designed to catch people doing nefarious things. So far, the high profile busts involving Tor all involve some other weaker link in the chain, such as traffic analysis[0], a CI, a targeted sting operation. etc. If this is the case and your hypothesis is true, then it appears to be unnecessary on their part, since all the folks they're prosecuting are those for whom other evidence is more readily available. (Before someone replies with "parallel construction": the point of parallel construction is to use methods that are easy but illegal to obtain evidence that can be used to help find "legal" sources of evidence that would otherwise not be easy or feasible. That doesn't really apply here, where the illegal (or in this case, secretive) method is more work than the "official" method). [0] e.g. that case a decade ago where a student called in a bomb threat using Tor, and the university was able to determine that exactly one person on campus was using Tor at that time - not by compromising Tor itself, but because Tor traffic is detectable by ISPs.