Man found guilty of child porn because he ran a Tor exit node

>downloading maps and trying to make a way to view them locally

Before smartphones this was common. Standalone gps units had maps locally stored. Some of the ones mounted in car dashboards stored them on an internal DVD. I used to have to drive a lot for work long before they were commonly built in to cars and I had an aftermarket one mounted on my dashboard, a little 2” monochrome display. Storage was tight, and I’d have to hook it up to my computer to swap out map sets if I was traveling further than usual.

A jury trial of your peers is a rare thing these days. This is how it would go down:

The investigator says "who's been downloading CP?" and everyone looks at you. Probably because you're the weirdo internet geek among the family/roommates. They now have a suspect, and nothing you say then will convince them otherwise. They interview everyone separately leading the conversation to get statements about circumstantial things that out of context don't make you look good.

It's enough to get a search & data warrant. They take your phone, your PC, all your hard drives, and pull every website you've ever accessed and every email you've ever received or sent. They trawl through this for anything out of place, or which can be construed out of context to be something they can pin on you. This is no longer about CP--they "know" you are guilty, but the fact that they can't find any CP on your computer just means your smart enough to know how to hide it. Now they're just trying to find something to stick to put you away. The Al Capone nail-him-on-tax-evasion-or-whatever-sticks strategy.

You don't hear anything for a while so you think this whole thing is behind you, and you're just pissed you can't get your PC and phone back. Then they show up and arrest you. Your lawyer explains there are five felony charges against you, including the CP thing, and you're looking at 30 years to life where the survival time of a CP convict in the general population is about 3 days. The evidence is flimsy and you can fight these charges in court, but it'll cost you hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees and your success at winning all counts is really up to the whims of the judge and/or jury. The DA offers a plea deal: 3 years house arrest, community service, and registration on the sex offenders list, but critically: no prison. The weekend is coming and you're going to be shipped out from the local police lockbox to county jail. The DA is dragging his feet on getting you into protective custody. You sign the plea deal and walk out alive, but fucked for life.

Welcome to the modern criminal justice system.

[This more or less happened to a college roommate of mine (not CP though), and a Tor developer I knew through work.]

This is really the unfortunate truth. >90% of global ISP's not only collect but also sell netflow metadata commercially. Nanosecond timestamps, packet sizes, source IPs, destination IP's. Doesn't matter what VPN provider you use, whether you're using Tor, how many residential proxies you're routing through via a complex proxychains config... commercial entities can correlate virtually all of it.

Team Cymru is one such buyer of bulk netflow metadata from ISP's (and their upstream providers) around the globe, who do all of the correlation work on their side, and then sell it, under product names like Pure Signal Recon (formerly Augury)... including to law enforcement agencies and the US military...

There are also no laws dictating that ISP's must disclose whether or not they are selling that information, and they have no commercial incentive to choose to honestly disclose that they do.

If your adversary is NSA/FBI/US Army, or any other deep-pocketed nation-state-level adversaries who Team Cymru is willing to sell to, the safest assumption is that there is absolutely nothing you can do to obscure the origin of your traffic with 100% certainty.

Run by a cousin of Honest Achmed[1] maybe

[1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=647959