Today, Tor is being marketed as some kind of grass-roots privacy tool that will protect you against government surveillance and various bad actors.Īccording to Roger Dingledine (Tor co-founder) and other key Tor developers, getting people (outside the US government) to widely adopt Tor is very important for the US government’s ability to use Tor for its own purposes. Never mind the fact that the Tor network is a popular hangout for pedophiles and drug dealers – along with the law enforcement these types attract. Honest criticism of Tor is often met with accusations of “FUD” and ad-hominem attacks, so as not to disrupt the collective Groupthink. Unfortunately, Tor has garnered a cult-like following in recent years among people who pretend it’s infallible.
No privacy tool is above criticism or scrutiny, and each has pros and cons. There is a growing chorus of people who blindly recommend Tor to anyone looking for online anonymity. This recommendation often ignores mountains of evidence suggesting that Tor is not the “privacy tool” it’s made out to be. This article will examine some facts about Tor and assess whether it is the infallible privacy tool it’s made out to be by some. In early August, Lavabit and Silent Circle both shut down their secure email services, citing government pressure and the difficulty involved in plugging all the leaks inherent in the internet email protocols.There is a lot of misinformation being promoted in various privacy circles about Tor. The figures come on the heels of a seemingly never-ending series of revelations about security agencies in the US and UK and their roles in spying on internet traffic, both at home and abroad. The reasons for the usage spike are not clear, but you can pretty much take your pick. As of Wednesday, the Tor network was seeing more than 1,200,000 users connecting daily, a figure that topped the previous record of around 950,000 global daily users in January 2012.
The network, which anonymizes internet traffic by routing it through a series of encrypted relays, had been humming along with an average base of around 500,000 directly connected users for most of the year.īut that started to change around mid-August, and the results were both sudden and dramatic. Tor traffic was up all over the globe in August 2013 – and we do mean up (Source: Tor Project)
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