With anonymity comes great power, and some users have used this power to perform illegal criminal activities such as the selling of drugs, terrorism, etc. in the Deep Web using Tor to protect their identity, as critics of Tor have mentioned, keeping in mind the original intention for Tor’s creation for legitimate purposes in the first place (Yetter 2015 p18).

The Tor project organization has no way to counter this problem as Tor’s design prevents even its creators from knowing the identities of its users or qualifying the content on Hidden Services servers (Yetter 2015 p18). It is hard to predict if Tor should, or can, somehow come up with an algorithm to eliminate the undesirable activities from the legitimate ones associated with the likes of human rights, freedom of speech and privacy, for that would be defeating the whole purpose of ensuring that every Tor user can be rest assured of their privacy and protection. Although it would be ideal to separate the Dark Web from the Deep web, it is simply not feasible.

A research in 2013 by scientists Biryukov, Pustogarov, and Weinmann found that the amount of sites used for illegal activity was roughly equal to  legitimate sites. They managed to do this analysis due to the discovery of a vulnerability in TOR’s protocol. Tor operators filled this loophole so now even the categorization of content and user base is unknown.

This just proves that The Tor Project has to constantly ensure that their systems and technology keeps up with the changes in order for the software to remain a usable anonymizing network that can handle the growing pool of users. Another vulnerability in the protocol, or any slip-ups that might happen, would compromise on the safety of their users.

It is a known fact that the more people download and use Tor, the more sources and destination there are, which in turn increases security for everyone as users of the web will seem like an endless crowd of faceless people in one place, making identifying each one more impossible. This is vital for TOR’s future as with Governments and big corporate companies knowing the existence of TOR and how it operates, they will find means and ways to block and prevent this. Without the security of anonymity, the ability to speak and read freely online, and other social and political issues for journalists, activists and political dissidents who want to disclose the truth, will be unattainable.

Tor has to constantly improve and make progress, and has reached out to the public to consider running a relay or volunteering as a developer. Unfortunately last year, the TOR Cloud Project had to be shut down as there were not enough developers contributing to the project to run efficiently.

“The main reason for discontinuing Tor Cloud is the fact that software requires maintenance, and Tor Cloud is no exception,” Tor says.

There was a lack of Tor developers to ensure that the software is up-to-date and bug free, which compromises the security and privacy of its users. Tor Cloud Project was supposed to give users access to the network in exchange for donated bandwidth. This is one major disadvantage Tor has, as it gives competitor softwares such as Hornet, an advantage. Hornet is a “high-speed onion routing network which leverages next-generation architecture to make user tracking more difficult” (Osborne 2015). Developed by academics from Carnegie Mellon University, Zurich’s Federal Institute of Technology and University College London, “the low-latency onion routing system enables end-to-end anonymous channels and has been designed as a quicker and more secure alternative to Tor” (Osborne 2015).

If Tor does not manage to have a sufficient pool of developers keeping the software up-to-date and more efficient with each update, they will definitely lose to Hornet and the likes.

A major advantage that Tor has is that legal actions taken by any government would prove meaningless, “as there is no central authority to shut down and no key technology to outlaw” (Abbott 2010 p26). A court order in one country is not sufficient enough to remove the substantial amount of nodes to shut down Tor; this would require multinational efforts. While it is possible to completely block Tor, it is not feasible as Tor is seen as a national security asset. A 1998 document titled “Pushing the Horizon: 75 years of High Stakes Science at the Naval Research Laboratory” listed “onion routing” as a current project alongside “stealth materials” (Abbott 2010 p27). The advantages of Tor currently outweighs the disadvantages, despite having an almost equal amount of legitimate websites to illegal ones.