People need to stop drinking beer and watching commieball on TV and start learning this crap. Freedom isn't always easy.
When free speech on political topics has been made effectively illegal via government-controlled corporations, the only way we will be able to speak freely is by using the same tools that criminals sometimes resort to.
A tool is a tool. TOR does not promote illegal activity. It is an anti-censorship tool. TOR only has the stigma of being "for shady people" because up to this point, most law-abiding citizens could speak their minds and conduct business on the clearweb with few repercussions. Therefore, most people using TOR were only doing so to anonymize illegal activity.
I can assure you that people in communist China who are desperate to speak freely with friends and family outside the great firewall don't view TOR as a no-go because "omg criminals use it". While I respect where you are coming from, I disagree with you when it comes to the situation we are in.
That is assuming the NSA isn't already extorting the major VPN providers for realtime data on their customers. Which they almost certainly are.
There is a reason why TOR does three randomized hops. Bouncing your IP once is good enough to not get caught torrenting, but it is not enough to permanently make you safe from a communist government with an intelligence service and armed goons at its disposal.
Exactly right. You're not gonna get the general patriot population onto TOR overnight. But we do need a way for the core to communicate in an uncensorable way, get initial info out as it develops, and then it filters through to the mainstream by simply going viral organically on communist social media or other smaller websites.
Once you get a critical mass of people spreading news via a wide variety of platforms, it becomes uncensorable due to the sheer numbers involved (AI and paid human commiemods can only do so much at one time). A tweet that is only up for 10 minutes can be screenshotted by hundreds, and so it spreads.
A TOR hidden service is a NECESSITY, as in, mission critical within the next couple of days. It scares me that there isn't one currently. I don't know much about Dread (hidden service that mimics Reddit-style convos), but if they are apolitical and/or committed to free speech, then starting a "subdreddit" or whatever it's called there might be a good option.
EDIT: Dread says it is committed to free speech but then says in the rules that discussion of "harmful weapons" is not permitted, nor is "Pro-terrorism" (obviously nobody here believes that publicly protesting and criticizing the government and media is terrorism, but obviously the leftists do, so I guess that depends on whether Dread is run by commies or not).
TOR is not a honey pot. The times when the feds have successfully busted people who were running TOR sites, it was due to OPSEC failures (eg. using the same screennames or email addresses somewhere else) or, in very rare cases, advanced browser exploits which were immediately patched by the TOR team afterwards.
If people in communist China can use a tool like TOR to speak against their government, I can assure you it is good enough for those who want to speak freely in the U.S., which has not (yet) reached that level of totalitarianism.