Better explicating the strengths and shortcomings of these models will help refine projections and improve transparency in the years ahead.
Image credit: Witsawat.S.
Edited by Douglas S. Massey, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, and approved October 23, 2020 (received for review June 10, 2020)
Article Figures & SI
Figures
- Fig. 1.
More politically “free” countries have higher proportions of Hidden Services traffic than is present in either “partially free” or “not free” nations (n = 195 countries). Each point indicates the average daily %HS for a given country. The white regions represent the kernel density distributions for each ordinal category of political freedom (“free,” “partially free,” and “not free”).
- Fig. 2.
Throughout the observed time period (12/31/2018–8/18/2019), “free” countries typically had a higher proportion of Hidden Services traffic than either “partially free” or “not free” nations on a daily basis. The green, cyan, and mauve lines indicate the average daily %HS for “free,” “partially free,” and “not free” countries, respectively (n = 37,922 country-days).
- Fig. 3.
Data show a positive association between Freedom House’s political freedom subcategories and average daily %HS. Each graph represents a different aspect of political freedom (the freedom of a country’s “electoral process,” its levels of “political pluralism and participation,” the “functioning of government,” the extent of “freedom of expression and belief,” “associational and organizational rights,” “rule of law,” and “personal autonomy/individual rights”). The same 195 countries (each represented by a point) appear in all seven graph. The blue line in each graph is a linear fitted line for the association between each subcategory of political freedom and %HS.
Tables
Variables n Mean Median SD Min Max Mean % HS 195.00 6.70 6.65 4.40 0.00 27.04 Political freedom (Freedom House)* 195.00 8.19 9.00 4.05 1.00 16.00 Polity2 (autocratic to democratic scale) 164.00 4.18 7.00 6.14 −10.00 10.00 GDP per capita (in $10,000s) 195.00 1.48 0.54 2.41 0.03 17.28 Population (in 100,000s) 195.00 38.89 8.84 143.67 0.01 1,392.73 % Net penetration 195.00 54.78 58.77 29.08 0.10 99.65 No. of cryptomarket sales (per 100,000)† 195.00 1.18 0.00 5.51 0.00 61.81 ↵* All political freedom measures have been coded so that higher levels indicate greater freedom.
↵† The cryptomarket sales volume per 100,000 people variable is a country-level measure of items listed as “ships from” on four markets that operated shortly before our data collection period (scraped 2017–2018; data available here, ref. 27). These cryptomarkets include: Dream, Traderoute, Berlusconi, and Valhalla. The country-level sales volume estimations are normalized around the population of each country, providing the resulting measure of per capita cryptomarket activity. The top 10 countries in terms of such activity are Netherlands, United Kingdom, Australia, Germany, Finland, Luxembourg, Canada, United States, Hong Kong, and Belgium. Countries without any items sold were coded as a zero.
- Table 2.
Ordinary Least Squares regression on two measures of country-level political conditions
Mean % HS Model 1 Model 2 Model 3 Model 4 Model 5 Model 6 Political freedom (Freedom House) 0.325*** (0.075) 0.300*** (0.077) 0.171* (0.081) Polity2 (autocratic to democratic scale) 0.232*** (0.048) 0.216*** (0.049) 0.171*** (0.048) Number of cryptomarket sales (per 100,000) 0.077 (0.056) 0.036 (0.056) 0.086 (0.050) 0.045 (0.053) GDP per capita (in $10,000s) 0.024 (0.156) −0.114 (0.221) Population (in 100,000s) −0.003 (0.002) −0.003 (0.002) % Net penetration 0.044*** (0.013) 0.047*** (0.013) Constant 4.038*** (0.681) 4.152*** (0.685) 2.921*** (0.800) 5.711*** (0.359) 5.664*** (0.358) 3.672*** (0.634) N 195 195 195 164 164 164 R2 0.090 0.098 0.176 0.124 0.140 0.236 *P < 0.05, **P < 0.01, ***P < 0.001.
The potential harms of the Tor anonymity network cluster disproportionately in free countries
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