Tor as the gateway to information
The Tor network empowers people to access the uncensored internet from many places around the world. It provides a way for all of humanity to access information in a free and open manner. It includes many tools and options to circumvent censorship and even active measures taken against it. Tor bridges or the Snowflake browser add-on, for example, help people in censored countries connect to Tor even when the known entry node IPs are blocked by the state.
How Tor gives you freedom of speech
But that’s only half of it. The freedom to acquire information is arguably one of the most fundamental qualities of a good life. Freedom of expression is also essential for a free and fulfilling life. Tor also enables people who have to fear the consequences of an authoritarian state to publish their opinions as anonymously as possible and therefore protect those freedoms.
How you can use Tor
For those of you not very tech-savvy, here’s a little summary of how Tor works and how you can access the “darknet”.
If you want to start browsing the Tor network and the “normal” World Wide Web, you need a special browser. This browser is called the Tor Browser and you can download it here. With this browser installed, you can use it like any other browser.
You might notice that it is a bit slow, but this is because of how the Tor network works. Basically, your whole traffic is encrypted multiple times like an onion. That’s also where the name Tor comes from — The Onion Router. This traffic is then sent over multiple computers, so your initial location can only be traced back with difficulty and under very specific conditions. This enables the end user to stay private.
There is also a new type of top-level domain available if you are using the Tor browser. (A top-level domain (TLD) is something like .com, .org, .net, .de, .au, .nz, …) This TLD is .onion and can only be accessed over the Tor network. You can get a domain like that for free and they look kind of weird. Here is mine, for example: lnadevwj2vzomixiunv7i4lahwpoxh6zw56cxbce3uui5ijmwt4czpyd.onion. That is because there need to be many different ones if you want to give them out for free.
These .onion domains allow the creator of the website to hide their IP address and therefore stay (sort of) “anonymous” — similar to the user, but the other way around. This is, like I said before, needed if you want to express yourself from within a repressive country. But even today it is needed for activists, journalists, whistleblowers and many more groups of people needed for a well-functioning and free democracy.
Why does that concern me?
Our world gets more autocratic and dangerous day by day. Looking at you, USA… But even here in Europe, things look bad. Far-right-wing parties with high vote counts and corrupt politicians, for a start. More worrying is that even the more democratic parties are applying more and more autocratic tools like mass surveillance and strengthening the police… Still, the situation in America is way worse — not even speaking of all the other parts of the world like China or Russia, which are the authoritarian powerhouses of this world.
With all this repression, there is a big need in the world for tools like Tor and they need to be supported as much as possible. I wanted to check out how difficult it is to host a website — in my case, this one — on Tor, or as the mainstream calls it, “the darknet”. As it turns out, it is extremely easy, as you’ll see in one of my upcoming blog posts about how my setup works. But for now, let’s just say you can skip a couple of steps compared to a traditional website. You don’t need to buy a domain — you just get one for free. You also don’t need to worry about any firewalls or anything similar. Tor goes straight through it. Remember, Tor was designed to thrive in a censored environment.
With the knowledge to host a website over the Tor network and the information on how easy it is broadly available, we are better prepared for a reality that isn’t as fine as our current situation (in which many people currently live and suffer under).
So for me, it was an experiment to see how this technology works and to gain the knowledge — and hope I never need it. My website is the same here and on the darknet, so I have no anonymity boost because of it. But after all, it’s also just very cool and interesting to me. Censorship-prevention technologies have fascinated me since like forever.
How you can learn more about this topic
There are a couple of good sources about the threat of authoritarianism, Tor and how it can help. The most obvious source is the website of Tor itself. There you can find a lot of information about how Tor works and how to use it. Also consider going through the blog posts on their page to see news and that sort of thing.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has a section about free speech and a bit about Tor.
There are many other resources out there — explore, read and stay curious. The more people understand and support tools like these, the more resilient we become.