Dark Net Browser Tor Hosts More "Revenge Porn"

Tor provides a safe way for you to enter and navigate the “dark net." It is an anonymizing web browser that once hosted the Silk Road, a former online drug market, and now seems to be the key promulgator of so-called Revenge Porn.

What is revenge porn? It is exactly what it sounds like. Revenge porn is usually recourse taken by a spurned lover, usually the man. To avenge his "broke heart," he uploads any sexually explicit images or videos of the woman in question. The smut usually includes the target's personal information, including the pictured individual's full name, links to Facebook and social media profiles and even, on occasion, home addresses. The resulting damage to a person's reputation, future relationships, and career can be quite severe, sometimes leading to additional real-world abuse of the victims.



Occasionally victims are known to have committed suicide. [Read the above story from the Economist, as well as this CNN article and this story from Slate.com.]

Unfortunately, few legal remedies are available. However, some states within the United States are making new laws, which are pending, though many critics describe these efforts as largely ineffective.

The founder of Pink Meth, a Tor Hidden Service that "allows you to post anyone's nudes and info," who calls himself “Olaudah Equiano,” says he’s not concerned about a lawsuit against Tor because its "creators cannot physically shut down a site that operates on its network."

“Domain registrars unfortunately choose to suspend any and all of our domains after they get contacted by a threatening attorney like Jason Van Dyke,” Equiano says. “Project like Pink Meth is simply much more suited as a hidden service as opposed to a regular website.”



With a normal domain registrar, lawyers can sue to obtain the records of someone who runs a particular website. But Tor doesn’t have or maintain those records. Tor operates by turning computers into anonymous “exit relay nodes”—so the operators of sites never fear the risk of exposure.

“This is idiotic to sue Tor as complicit in this,” one commenter notes on a popular Tor forum on Reddit. “That is like suing the Postal Service for a legally delivered firearm that was used in the commission of a crime, or blaming a cab driver for a fare who subsequent commits murder. This is an age old case of trying to kill the messenger for the contents of the message.”

Still, as more illicit sites migrate to Tor, there has been mounting legal pressure on Tor’s architects—and its users.


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