The copyright to the article remains with the author and any subsequent commercial reuse must be agreed by both parties. The author licenses the article to the Surveillance Studies Network (SSN) for inclusion in Surveillance & Society (S&S), right of first publication. Surveillance & Society uses a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License. These findings suggest that the lure of the dark web and left-leaning ideological contexts offer stronger explanations for interest in anonymity-granting technology than the public attention brought to mass surveillance by the Snowden revelations. When controlling for the level of interest in the dark web, the Snowden revelations of 2013 had no significant impact on interest in Tor. Broadly, we find that metro areas with liberal citizen ideology and greater interest in the dark web were more likely to search for Tor.
We link data from multiple sources including Google Trends, the American Community Survey, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and the Cooperative Congressional Election Study for the forty-nine largest US Metropolitan Statistical Areas (MSAs) from 2006–2015 ( n=490).
This study examines how interest in the dark web, public attention to the 2013 Snowden revelations, and metro-area political ideology are associated with public interest in Tor. However, this same technology can be used to engage in illegal activity on the dark web. Interest in anonymity-granting technologies like The Onion Router (Tor) has grown substantially as citizens seek to protect their privacy. In the twenty-first century, Americans have put more of their lives online while the US government has expanded its mass surveillance apparatus.
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