[jgwest]

Seems like somebody in the DoJ just decided that Tor's balance between geeky CompSci curiosity and enabler of real-world criminal behavior has tipped too far in the latter direction. The legal case has been ripe for a while-- after all, Megaupload and many other networks have been disabled by the US government for enabling significantly LESS serious criminality. Ummm... world's biggest drug marketplace, anyone??? What's important to remember is that the gov't can't just go in and seize the directory authority servers willy-nilly. Instead, they must do it as part of a legal process against a specific, identified target. In this case, the likely target is going to be the Tor project itself and possibly the individuals leading it. The legal case might ruffle a few techie feathers but only an insignificant portion of the general public will care, and that portion can be mollified with the "stopping the bad horrible criminals" routine.

[sandworm]

Those were not shutdown for "enabling" criminal activity. They were shut down for actually doing criminal activity. With megaupload it was failure to abide by the DMCA, with silk road it was handling money for/from drug dealers. I cannot see how Tor has actually done anything criminal beyond what a thousand other transitory service providers do every day.

[rasz_pl]

in case of megaupload it was totally ILLEGAL, using bogus charges