Tor: How a Military Project Became a Lifeline for Privacy

Summary

The Secret History of Tor: How a Military Project Became a Lifeline for PrivacyA story of secrecy, resistance, and the fight for digital freedom.Photo credit: Alan W, via UnsplashBeeLine Reader uses subtle color gradients to help you read more efficiently.I’m sitting in a cold, scuffed, and dirty plastic chair on a crowded train, watching freezing fog stream past the window — one of the many unpleasant but strangely enjoyable everyday experiences of life in the United Kingdom. Despite the train carriage hailing from the mid-1980s, there is something resembling Wi-Fi service, and so I connect, hoping to sneak in a few hours of PhD research. I load up a website — or so I think — but instead reach a block page courtesy of the train’s Wi-Fi provider.Sighing, I load up the Tor Browser and type in the address. The website loads instantly.Tor is mostly known as the Dark Web or Dark Net, seen as an online Wild West where crime runs rampant. Yet it’s partly funded by the U.S. government, and the BBC and Facebook both have Tor-only versions to allow users in authoritarian countries to reach them.At its simplest, Tor is a distributed digital infrastructure that makes you anonymous online. It is a network of servers spread around the world, accessed using a browser called the Tor Browser, which you can download for free from the Tor Project website. When you use the Tor Browser, your signals are encrypted and bounced around the world before they reach the service you’re trying to access. This makes it difficult for governments to trace your activity or block access, as the network just routes you through a country where that access isn’t restricted.The dark net risesToday, privacy technologies like Tor underpin our digital society. From VPNs and encrypted messengers like WhatsApp to the basic security features in our digital systems, they’re essential tools for defending against cybercrime.But, because you can’t protect yourself from digital crime without also protecting yourse...