From what I gather, there are 25-30ish or so child abuse sites on .onions; law enforcement knows about all of them; and law enforcement bots probably make up th

From what I gather, there are 25-30ish or so child abuse sites on .onions; law enforcement knows about all of them; and law enforcement bots probably make up the vast bulk of their traffic. My take is that the very unusual spike is probably law enforcement bots (Internet Watch Foundation, et al) regularly spidering the sites - if they restarted Tor each time, to try to make it harder for the sites to block the spider, as I believe they probably do, then they would cause a brand new HSDir lookup each time, which would skew Dr Owen's stats considerably compared to even high-traffic hidden services used by regular users - as we see reflected in the data. Dr Owen also thinks (from his 31c3 talk) that this is indeed a plausible explanation, although of course there is insufficient data to test this hypothesis (and nor is there any reasonable way of getting it). Oh, and by the way, it is not only impractical for Tor to do anything about child abuse - it is not for Tor to do anything about this. Tor is a censorship-resistant, privacy-preserving computer network, by design. Please do not disrespect the value of liberty by asking anyone to find a way to censor it. If it can be censored for any reason, then it is vulnerable to being censored for every reason, and that vulnerability would need to be fixed. There is no fairy dust that can change that, and Tor is far too important for that - the devs know that well. Indeed, the anonymity that Tor provides can be (and is regularly) used by law enforcement to infiltrate the few online child abuse networks. (You'd probably see more on Hotmail, Yahoo and Facebook than on Tor.) The big problem of child abuse is not at all new, and it is not an internet problem. You're not even scratching the surface by saying it's a problem of poorly-resourced childrens' services; lack of appropriate treatment of the most at-risk people; of vulnerable young people being failed by the people and services they trust to protect them most; and of vicious organised crime exploiting the most innocent and the most guilty alike. It is complex, and multifaceted - and though it might make headlines to do so, absolutely no part of it can be solved by just blaming a convenient scapegoat like "the dark web" and fucking up the internet in revenge. That just makes everything worse. If you want to take action there, maybe donate to Sure Start or something instead, that might actually do some good.