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Subverting Surveillance or Accessing the Dark Web? Interest in the Tor Anonymity Network in U.S. States, 2006–2015

The U.S. government engaged in unprecedented forms of mass surveillance in the twenty-first century. Users of the The Onion Router (Tor), an anonymity-granting technology, mask themselves from state surveillance and can gain access to illicit content on the Dark Web. Drawing on theory regarding “exposure” to surveillance, this study examines how two issue-attention cycles (related to the Edward Snowden state surveillance revelations and the Dark Web respectively) are associated with public interest in the Tor browser in the United States. Using data at the state-year level from 2006 to 2015, this study estimates fixed effects models, controlling for sociodemographics, the presence of journalism, tech, and political jobs, as well as multiple measures of state political ideology. The results indicate that state-years with greater popularity of Google searches related to the Snowden story had significantly higher popularity of searches for Tor. By contrast, there was no association between Dark Web search popularity and Tor search popularity. These findings are consistent with the notion that the Snowden incident increased Americans’ sense of exposure, leading to interest in anonymity-granting technology.