The thing you need to keep in mind is that people in these researchers positions need to keep up appearances. It is against their interests to say that their software should be used for circumventing law enforcement. He shouldn't need any credibility to make this work, because if the math and design are sound and the code is open source, then he can be a DEA agent himself for all it matters. Some academic researcher is not likely to come out and say that they have just invented the most secure money laundering system in the world. Bitcoin is a bit of an exception, it was designed by an anonymous person with strong ties to anarchist ideology. I2P is another exception for the same reason. Freenet was not made by a pseudonymous person, and Tor is primarily maintained by a group of academic researchers. The Tor and Freenet people stress that their software has uses for people in totalitarian countries, to bypass government censorship, etc. Look at the list of people who use Tor from the Tor project for Christs sake, Law Enforcement in sting operations, the military, etc. They sure don't say Tor is used by pedophiles and drug dealers! Freenet points out that it is used primarily by people trying to get around government censorship, whistleblowers etc. They don't say that it is the biggest cache of child pornography in the world. On the other hand I2P folks say that their network is for Anarchists and militants, and Bitcoin, especially before it started becoming mainstream, was openly discussed as an anarchist revolution against the state. The Zerocoin researchers are obviously in a precarious situation. It is obvious that the main use of their system is for criminal financial activity. Freenet can say it is to avoid censorship, Tor can say it is to avoid censorship, hell even Bitcoin can say it is just an alternative currency. But a blind mixes sole purpose is criminal money transfer / money laundering. But I also agree with you that they should have handled it a bit better. They should have said it is a system to keep finances private etc etc, without mentioning the possibility of a backdoor for the police. However it also appears that they mentioned a backdoor will not be realistically possible in an open source project. Who wants to be the known university researcher who designed the biggest money laundering system in the world? Hell, for all they know they could be charged with conspiracy or something, so it is all about appearances. I guess I just can understand where they are coming from in trying to down play the threat of their system to the police and intelligence agencies. PS: Dingledine has a Ph.D , not sure about Schneier but he probably does as well.