Tor Browser, one of Tor Project’s services, is perhaps one of the best tools to protect our anonymity on the Internet. First and foremost, it gives residents of countries under Totalitarian Regimes the possibility to access sites that the “Governments” have banned access to- always for the Sake of the People. It is widely used by ordinary citizens, activists, journalists, etc, to maintain their anonymity and location, making tracking and tracing extremely difficult.
They protect their privacy from unscrupulous marketers and identity thieves.
Tor preserves the ability of people behind national firewalls or under the surveillance of repressive regimes to obtain a global perspective on controversial topics including democracy, economics and religion.
The History and Development
However strange it may sound, Tor started to be used by the United States Navy and was known as the “Onion Routing Project“. It is now run by a Board Of Directors, mainly academics, who are actively and strongly engaged in the protection of Personal Data, Freedom of Speech and Free Internet Access, devoid of Tracking.
How it Works
The whole network is based on volunteers who’ve set up relays throughout the world. Thus, through the Tor Browser, when a user makes a connection, they receive a list of potential Tor network transponders.
The Tor client operating in our system will select a Random Route through successive nodes on the Tor network. The entire route is through encrypted channels, while each node can only see the next one and not the complete route.
To increase security, the network will select a new random path after a timeout. The time limit is set at about ten minutes, and every new communication from our system will go through new transponders, making it virtually impossible to have our efforts located.
The Power Lies in Numbers
The truth is that the average user isn’t aware of two very serious problems; that is, their personal data exploitation and the constant ”surveillance” of what they read or watch even at the privacy of their home. And we are still talking about citizens in the so-called “Free World” where Privacy and Freedom of speech are constitutional rights and our personal information is protected by the law. If we move further from the “Democratic World”, we will find out that there are depressive governments in several parts of our planet. In those cases, terms like “censorship” and “propaganda” are introduced. Earlier in history, those governments tended to control the information that reached the general population simply by controlling the media, such as Television, Radio, and Newspapers. With the advent of the Internet, this turned out to be quite a difficult task as new “voices” started to appear aplenty and anonymous, plus they often originated from outside a country’s borders. Every new voice that openly contradicted official governmental channels had to be silenced. They had to use measures to identify and locate those “Voices” inside their borders.
At the same time, there had to be a restriction on the access the population had to external sources. As a result, lists of websites that were out of reach by the public were generated. These lists started off small, but they increased proportionately with the excuses of those creating them, always for the “Sake of the People” and “Protecting the Interests of the Country”.
Then, Tor made its appearance. The number of volunteers started to rise and Relays began to appear everywhere; its power does indeed lie in numbers. Apart from downloading the Tor Browser, you may also consider installing a relay. Because our Freedom is under negotiation.
Further information on Privacy and Freedom of Speech can be found on the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF)
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