global voices, one world

Tor is a free software that you can use to connect to other sites on the network, even if the network doesn’t want you to.  It comes with a specification and full documentation.

Tor has about 1500 volunteers to serve as active “Tor relays,” allowing others to reroute their traffic through these volunteers.  There are about 200,000+ active users with >1 Gbit/s, and funding from the US Dept. of Defense, Electronic Frontier Foundation, Voice of America, Human Rights Watch, Google, and NLnet. 

Tor deals with “anonymity,” “privacy,” “network security,” and “reachability,” serving different interests for different user groups (government, private citizens, businesses, and blocked users). Few circumvention tools provide privacy, security, and anonymity in addition to circumvention; “circumvention” here addresses Internet filtering (as opposed to Rebecca MacKinnon’s concerns about web site censorship). RD will focus on these functionalities that Tor provides.

The goal for Tor is to distribute the relays over multiple hops, decentralizing trust so that no one intermediate hop knows who is talking to who over a sustained connection.  Tor provides three anonymity properties: (1) a LAN attacker can’t learn or influence your destination (useful for blocking resistance); (2) no single router can link you to your destination (no signing up relays to trace users); and (3) the destination can’t learn of your location (so they can’t reveal you or treat you differently).  

Tor can’t solve all problems, but it is sustainable: it is based on a community of volunteers and developers and on an open design.  Using Tor in oppressed areas – RD claims that as the firewall starts cracking down more and more, there will in fact be more Tor users who will be more “ordinary” people to be able to do what they used to do.

Another note: publicity attracts attention – the publicity attracted by censors threaten the impression of control by censors, which is arguably as, if not more, important to censors than the actual control.  We therefore control the pace of the arms race–we are not “doing against China,” but instead writing software to allow others to use for their own purposes.

Next steps: Tell the right people, keep working on the details.  Again, technical solutions will not solve the whole censorship problem (especially in countries where firewalls are socially very successful).  But a strong technical solution is still a critical piece of the puzzle.