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#include "head.wmi" TITLE="Abuse FAQ"
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<h2>Abuse FAQ</h2>
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<a id="WhatAboutCriminals"></a>
<h3><a class="anchor" href="#WhatAboutCriminals">Doesn't Tor enable criminals to do bad things?</a></h3>
<p>Criminals can already do bad things. Since they're willing to
break laws, they already have lots of options available that provide
<em>better</em> privacy than Tor provides. They can steal cell phones,
use them, and throw them in a ditch; they can crack into computers
in Korea or Brazil and use them to launch abusive activities; they
can use spyware, viruses, and other techniques to take control of
literally millions of Windows machines around the world. </p>
<p>Tor aims to provide protection for ordinary people who want to follow
the law. Only criminals have privacy right now, and we need to fix that. </p>
<p>Some advocates of anonymity explain that it's just a tradeoff —
accepting the bad uses for the good ones — but there's more to it
than that.
Criminals and other bad people have the motivation to learn how to
get good anonymity, and many have the motivation to pay well to achieve
it. Being able to steal and reuse the identities of innocent victims
(identify theft) makes it even easier. Normal people, on the other hand,
don't have the time or money to spend figuring out how to get
privacy online. This is the worst of all possible worlds. </p>
<p>So yes, criminals could in theory use Tor, but they already have
better options, and it seems unlikely that taking Tor away from the
world will stop them from doing their bad things. At the same time, Tor
and other privacy measures can <em>fight</em> identity theft, physical
crimes like stalking, and so on. </p>
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<a id="Pervasive"></a>
<h3><a class="anchor" href="#Pervasive">If the whole world starts using
Tor, won't civilization collapse?</a></h3>
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<a id="DDoS"></a>
<h3><a class="anchor" href="#DDoS">What about distributed denial of service attacks?</a></h3>