Forty people, thirty-seven towns, every county in New Jersey. Thank God but I didn’t know any of them; I can imagine that seeing a name you know on one of these lists would be alarming. As is usual in these cases, the defendants allegedly didn’t understand that anonymity on the Internet is a myth:
The Operation Statewide law enforcement team, led by New Jersey State Police detectives, followed the digital fingerprint of known images of child porn as they were being sent and received over file sharing networks to specific computers, according to a release from the State Police.
Internet addresses were traced to street addresses and detectives from partnering agencies knocked on the doors of many surprised defendants, one of whom was in the process of downloading child porn images.
If they want you badly enough, they’ll find you. Or they already know, because TOR was turned by the Feds years ago and the people that use it have been at the government’s mercy ever since. Oops, did I just type that out in public? My bad.
You’re assuming the feds didn’t make Tor in the first place.
.
AFAICT, it doesn’t seem like a labor of love by an eccentric, like PGP. It looks more like something put together by a dedicated team.
The government *did* make TOR in the first place. It was a Navy initiative, IIRC.
I remember reading that someone I went to elementary school with had been arrested at age 25 for dealing cocaine.