I think that oversimplifies an important point. Criminals may not CARE about breaking into someone's computer or router, but that doesn't mean they're capable of doing so. Tor significantly lowers the bar for anonymity online, and there is no question in my mind that it enables criminals who wouldn't have the means to mask their identities otherwise.

This is not necessarily an argument against tools like Tor, but it's a tradeoff that I think many Tor supporters are too willing to ignore.

Criminals are humans. They will use and abuse whatever infrastructure any other person has access to for their own purposes, much like (you guessed it) any other person.

Your argument is about as lazy as it is old. The only possible solutions are to make all criminals go extinct (good luck), or to take away tons of important tools away from the public, because get this, criminals might use them! How terrible.

Nowhere did I advocate "taking away tons of important tools", in fact I specifically said my point wasn't necessarily an argument against Tor. But what I think is lazy is the way some people pretend that there are no tradeoffs involved in things like Tor and that they only benefit "the public".

> Criminals may not CARE about breaking into someone's computer or router, but that doesn't mean they're capable of doing so.

The problem with this line of reasoning is that it covers such a small number of people. The only people your argument covers are serious criminals who a) are too stupid to be able to download a simple tool to exploit routers with unpatched vulnerabilities from last year and yet b) are still competent enough to use Tor without doing anything that would reveal their identity.

And that also excludes the most serious criminals because the set of people who can break into the computers of large organizations to commit crimes is essentially a superset of the set of people who can break into an unpatched consumer-level router.