> This is a curious construction, one that I can't pin down to any kind of secondary-language issues. "Using Tor" is not the subject of that sentence, "who's looking" is.
> Passive voice also elides these serious issues by pinning results on nebulous activity.
No, no, no.
Firethief has already largely covered this, but: "Subject" and "passive voice" are grammatical terms. They have to do with the syntax of a sentence. Not with who performed an action, or whether that agency was clearly expressed in the sentence. There is nothing necessarily agency-hiding about the passive voice; conversely, one can hide agency quite well without using it.
Basically, go read some Language Log, they talk about this all the time. Hell, they've got a whole category for people complaining about the passive voice while not actually being able to identify when a sentence uses it: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?cat=54
> Passive voice also elides these serious issues by pinning results on nebulous activity.
No, no, no.
Firethief has already largely covered this, but: "Subject" and "passive voice" are grammatical terms. They have to do with the syntax of a sentence. Not with who performed an action, or whether that agency was clearly expressed in the sentence. There is nothing necessarily agency-hiding about the passive voice; conversely, one can hide agency quite well without using it.
Basically, go read some Language Log, they talk about this all the time. Hell, they've got a whole category for people complaining about the passive voice while not actually being able to identify when a sentence uses it: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?cat=54
(Edit: One particular post on the subject I should point out, I think -- http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=1227 )
Or here's a whole paper by Geoff Pullum on the subject, with more examples than you can shake a stick at in section 3: http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/~gpullum/passive_loathing.pdf