What they don’t grasp is that if Tor were cohesive - physically or ideologically - its members could be identified. Jacob Appelbaum, a developer for Tor who travels the world explaining Tor to human rights and social-justice activists, tells me that users periodically complain about the politics and motivations of other (self-identified) users. Tor is by design not a media project or a human rights one or (anymore) a military one. When a communication arrives from Tor, you can never know where or whom it’s from. Peaceniks and human rights groups use Tor, as do journalists, private citizens and the military, and the heterogeneity and farflungness of its users - together with its elegant source code - keep it unbreachable. The software has been downloaded more than 36 million times this year, and thousands of nameless volunteers - many of them Tor clients - now help to relay mind-bogglingly diverse Tor data in nearly every country on earth. government and other funders, the Tor Project has prolifically expanded its networks. In the past year, supported by grants from the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory introduced it at a California security conference. WikiLeaks, the swashbuckling new-media organization whose motto is “We open governments,” relies on a technology of extreme reticence called Tor Hidden Services - a part of the Tor Project, a nonprofit organization dedicated not to light and clarity but to shadows and opacity, to the increasingly difficult art of keeping secrets online.Ī deliberately byzantine system of virtual tunnels that conceal the origins and destinations of data, and thus the identity of clients, Tor has been around since 2001, when programmers from M.I.T.

The tor project founder