&gt; It is clear that the court does not understand how the Tor network works. The entire purpose of the network is to enable users to communicate privately and securely.<p>The order demonstrates a perfectly adequate understanding of the technology: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;motherboard.vice.com&#x2F;read&#x2F;carnegie-mellon-university-attacked-tor-was-subpoenaed-by-feds" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;motherboard.vice.com&#x2F;read&#x2F;carnegie-mellon-university...</a>.<p>Tor does not actually hide your IP address from the public Internet. Someone technically ignorant might believe that (in which case, his expectation of privacy is based on a false assumption and is thus objectively unreasonable), but that&#x27;s not the guarantee Tor provides. What onion routing does is ensure that someone sitting in the middle cannot identify <i>both the source and destination of a packet</i>.<p>But the legally relevant technical question is not whether someone can track the packet from the source to the destination. It&#x27;s whether the user&#x27;s IP address has been revealed to the public. That&#x27;s necessarily the case even when communicating over Tor; that&#x27;s just how the Internet <i>works</i>.