https://metrics.torproject.org/users.html That is interesting. I was perplexed by the fact that the number of relays increased from 3500 to almost 4500 in a few months: https://metrics.torproject.org/network.html but the number of users had stayed the same. I highly doubt this spike was caused by the DPR interview, which hasn't come out in print yet. The online version has received 380,000 views, some of them the same people who visited the page several times. Maybe 200,000 to 300,000 unique people have read that article, not enough to account for a 900,000 increase in Tor clients, even if we absurdly assumed that 100% of people reading the article decided to run Tor and buy drugs on SR (it's probably more like 1%). For anyone interested, the thread is here: https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-talk/2013-August/thread.html#29582 The hypotheses range from Pirate Browser to Russian Tor censorship to botnets, but Pirate Browser seems to be the most popular explanation.