I think it's creepy that lots of random people can see what you're doing on the Internet, nefarious stuff or not. So I see enabling privacy wherever possible as a step in the right direction, regardless if it attracts users or not. In this case, I didn't think too hard about it. James proposed the idea a few days ago. I looked into it and set it up yesterday, and announced this morning.
As for the service being used exclusively by law breakers, I think that hypothetical is far-fetched. DDG has plenty of users now that don't care much about privacy, and I don't think most Tor users are law breakers. So I see this whole line of reasoning as a non-issue.
Advertising your service as an untraceable anonymous service, is attractive to certain groups of people. A large amount of those are going to be engaging in unlawful activities.
The analogy would be advertising your restaurant as one in which you are permitted to enter wearing full body disguises and helped with your exit through various escape routes. The restaurant owners will provide gloves for you, remove any traces of your DNA, etc.
Don't you think such a restaurant would then be used by murderers?
I would agree with your analogy in that an 'anonymous restaurant', where you are granted complete anonymity whilst inside, would also be a recipe for disaster.
You kinda forgot the 'anonymity' bit in your analogy though... Convenient ;)
There are plenty of good people out there who need anonymity. People whos lives depend on it. Just because you don't need anonymity doesn't mean you should deprive everyone else of it.
Not sure what your point is. How many users does a non profit service need before it's no longer niche and worth pursuing? Even if Tor only had 100 users who were safer for it, I'd say it was worth it.
You're seriously suggesting HN users can't work out the difference between an 'o' and a '0'? I'd credit them with slightly more intelligence than that.
