<p>&#8220;Good lord that’s awful. Part of the problem with defending certain freedoms to people who are getting their information on some topics exclusively from the media(I’m not bashing the media, but they can’t cover all the nuances of some topics) is that to them it can appear that you are defending monsters. I fully support the right of all people to have easy access to unbreakable cryptography, something which allowed these men to get away with and spread the contemptuous things they did for so long. To someone whose knowledge of Tor and the Darknet is this court case(and perhaps the unproven murder for hire accusations against Ross) then the only logical conclusion to draw is that I want children to be less safe and for child abusers to be able to get some kind of sick darknet fame while law enforcement is helpless against these men’s digital security. However, the same core technology(strong encryption) that holds Tor together is also what keeps us all from having our identities stolen every time we put our credit card information into Amazon.</p>
<p>On the topic at hand, I think people prefer to keep the darkest of the darknet a mythical unknown for several reasons. First, almost every single time there is a major deepweb child pornography bust the people arrested are just normal looking people; we don’t want to think that the people we see walking down the street every day may do unspeakable things when they’re alone. To a certain degree I think it’s less that humanity has a fear of the unknown as much as it has a compulsion to fear the unknown; these people, while the worst of the worst mankind has to offer, are a known fear, which makes them significantly less frightening than the untold monstrosities our imagination cooks up at the back of our minds.&#8221;</p>
