This chapter happens in the year 2000, but Tor wasn't released until
late 2002, absolutely unreadable
/s
Hahah, I came to comment a similar thing
In truth, the author could've fixed this very easily. Onion routing as a concept had already been invented in the mid-90s by the US government, so free software enthusiasts around the globe could have already hobbled together an alliance of sorts to make untraceable communication through onion routing. It wouldn't have been anything as dense and ubiquitous a network as Tor project but it would've been more than enough to be impossible to trace the origins for a generic police task force in 2000.
But by calling it tor, which is an acronym that didn't exist until 2002 even among people intimately familiar with onion routing research, the author has unfortunately missed the mark.
Anyway this chapter is fucking adorable as usual.