How Has Tor Helped You? We Need Your Stories

by steph | September 20, 2018

 

It’s an understatement to say a lot has happened related to privacy and freedom online over the past seven years! Surveillance and crackdowns on free speech have increased around the world, and vast amounts of personal data have been collected and sold. Tools like Tor are needed more than ever to allow people to browse the web freely and privately.

It’s been seven years since we last asked, so we want to know: What do you use Tor for? Why do you need it? What has Tor done for you? What could have happened if you weren’t able to use Tor? We need your stories!

We know these examples exist, and we reference them in our talks around the world, but these stories are more powerful when they come as a quotable personal narrative from you.

Here are some examples of stories we’re interested to hear you tell:

Censorship circumvention. Has Tor helped you access social media or critical resources when they were blocked by your government or ISP? What kind of consequences could you have faced without Tor?  

Political organizing. Has Tor helped you organize a protest or share political resources when doing so without Tor could’ve been dangerous?

Coping with domestic abuse or stalking. Has Tor helped protect you from an abusive relationship or helped prevent someone monitoring your activity?

Curtailing surveillance. Are you an activist who has used Tor to protect yourself from surveillance online?

Medical research. Has Tor helped you research a medical condition without fear of corporate profiling on you or your loved ones?

Journalism. Has Tor helped you communicate anonymously with sources or conduct controversial research?

Whistleblowing or anti-corruption reporting. Did Tor help you submit details of corruption without putting yourself at risk?

If any of these apply to you, or if you have another story to share, please let us know!

Your stories will help us:

  • Demystify Tor to the general public
  • Reach more people who could benefit from Tor’s protections
  • Help our funders justify their support of Tor to their boards of directors
  • Raise funds from new sponsors and individual donors to diversify our funding and ensure Tor remains independent, robust, and secure

We would like to share these stories on social media, on our website, in materials about our work, and in conversations with potential users and supporters. You don’t have to tell us your name, but if you do (or you contact us in a way that reveals it), we won’t use it without your explicit permission.

Please use caution when telling us the details of your story. If too many details could reveal who you are and put you at risk, please leave that information out. Do not respond to this request if it could put you in danger.

That said: Why do you use Tor? Since we designed Tor with privacy in mind, we can't know unless you tell us.

How To Share Your Story

There are several ways you can tell us how Tor has helped you.

Please be as specific as you can without putting yourself at risk.

Thank you!

** Update February 2019: The latest version of our survey can be found at https://survey.torproject.org/index.php/771942 and http://bogdyardcfurxcle.onion/index.php/771942 **

 

Comments

Please note that the comment area below has been archived.

September 20, 2018

Permalink

I live in Iran and I have been using Tor for censorship circumvention. During political unrest while the government tightens grip on other censorship circumvention alternatives, Tor with obfuscation plugins remain the only solution. Tor changed my personal life in many ways. It made it possible to access information on Youtube, Twitter, Blogger and countless other sites. I am grateful of Tor project, people working on it as well as people running Tor nodes.

Hi Ali

I live in Iran too and use Tor for Twitter and Facebook. I have a problem. I disable Java to get best security on Twitter and Facebook especially and the rest website I visited. While I disable Java, I can't attache and insert image in my tweets, and just "Tweet" button is visible below the tweet box. I know if I enable Java feature, the view changes to standard and normal view, so I have more features and I'm able to attache image in my tweets, but I'm worry and scared it can be dangerous and put my privacy and anonymity in danger and the hackers and IT experts who work for Iran's regime track and recognize me. If you have enough knowledge and experience about Tor and If safe to enable java and use Tweeter in normal view, give me some advice and help please.

Thank You
Kambiz

September 20, 2018

Permalink

The company I work for is relentlessly investigating every employee (without telling us of course), and they are literally announcing censorship policies (subjects we are not allowed to talk about online in our private lives) on a monthly basis. Everyone that has spoken up and objected to this policy has been either 'moved sideways' or 'joined the expense reduction program' as one manager calls it. Tor has enabled many of us to continue enjoying social media circles, speaking freely without fear of work reprisal, and otherwise living a life without fear of censorship. I use Tor almost exclusively now - it is the most important development on the internet in my view, and I salute all those that work on and develop this amazing tool.

September 20, 2018

Permalink

I'm a student in Hong Kong, you might call me an activist as well. I use Tor to fight for our city to retain some of the democracy we currently enjoy. Many people confuse our movement with trying to bring Britain back or something like that. It's never been about Britain or China per se, it's about being able to decide our own future instead of being ruled by autocrats from a far off city.

I have heard of others in my place who are now under investigation or possibly facing jail time, this isn't a risk I can take. Thank you, Tor Project. There are certainly improvements to be made with the Bundle, such as its JavaScript settings, Punycode, etc. but without it my life might've been over by now. Thanks.

As another student in Hong Kong, while I fully support Hongkongers' democratic and human rights and Hong Kong's autonomy from China, I seriously doubt your life is truly in danger (the Chinese government hasn't abducted people en masse so far, so we're not really there yet), and I think hyperbolic and unfounded statements like "without [the Tor Browser Bundle] my life might've been over by now" are not helpful to your activism regardless of how noble the particular causes you fight are.

[Moderator: IMO, it is important that a factually inaccurate claim about a repressive government not be left to stand unchallenged, particularly in a pro-human-rights blog.]

> the Chinese government hasn't abducted people en masse so far

What about Xinjiang Province?

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jan/25/at-least-120000-muslim-ui…
China 'holding at least 120,000 Uighurs in re-education camps'
US-backed news group claims Mao-style camps are springing up on China’s western border
Tom Phillips in Beijing
25 Jan 2018

> At least 120,000 members of China’s Muslim Uighur minority have been confined to political “re-education camps” redolent of the Mao era that are springing up across the country’s western borderlands, a report has claimed...

https://www.hrw.org/news/2017/09/10/china-free-xinjiang-political-educa…
China: Free Xinjiang ‘Political Education’ Detainees
Muslim Minorities Held for Months in Unlawful Facilities

> (New York) – The Chinese government should immediately free people held in unlawful “political education” centers in Xinjiang and shut them down, Human Rights Watch said today. Since about April 2017, the authorities have forcibly detained thousands of Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslim minorities at these centers, where they are subjected to propaganda promoting Chinese identity...

> the Chinese government hasn't abducted people en masse so far

I don't think we can let that statement fly by without any qualification.

There is abundant document from reliable sources of state-sponsored disappearances in Hong Kong. Worse, there is abundant evidence that far to the West, the Chinese government has sent about a million Uighurs to political re-education camps:

huffingtonpost.com
How The World Learned China Is Holding Over A Million Muslims In Internment Camps
Regular citizens, reporters and rights groups adapted to get the truth out about China's treatment of Uighur Muslims.
Akbar Shahid Ahmed
15 Aug 2018

> United Nations human rights experts made global headlines in a session that concluded Monday when they said they believe China is holding 1 million members of a Muslim minority group in secret prison camps.

Further, when one adult in a family is sent to the camps, the children are sent to orphanages where they are punished for speaking their language and are instructed to denounce their parents:

huffingtonpost.com
China Treats Uighur Kids As ‘Orphans’ After Parents Seized
“It’s like my kids are in jail. My four children are separated from me and living like orphans.”
Yanan Wang and Dake Kang
22 Sep 2018

> ... internment of more than 1 million Uighurs and other Muslim minorities that has alarmed a United Nations panel and the U.S. government. Now there is evidence that the [Chinese] government is placing the children of detainees and exiles into dozens of orphanages across Xinjiang.

Further, many Uighur families are being forced to accept a government "monitor" into their homes, who literally lives with them for weeks or months, forces the family to participate in nightly re-education classes in which they denounce their imprisoned relatives, etc.

Other monitors visit schools are interrogate children about religious practices at home. Should a child blurt out that prayers are said, the adults are punished.

Political prisons, family separations, coerced denunciations of relatives, encouraging children to snitch: all this must remind many of the abuses by the Red Guards during Mao's reign.

The sources for reports such as those cited above in the Western media do include Radio Free Asia (RFA), a Tor sponsor which has embarrassing origins as a U.S. State Department "soft power" organization with ties to CIA. Yuk. But the sources also include Human Rights Watch (HRW) and other trusted groups which have also strongly criticized human rights abuses by USG.

Speaking of which, supporters of human rights have been quick to notice the chilling similarities between the Drump administration family separation policies regarding asylum seekers from strife torn Latin American countries. So far the USG children's detention camps have been notably less organized than the Chinese orphanages, but both appears to share the goal of destroying family bonds and cultural identity:

hrw.org
New Satellite Imagery Shows Growth in Detention Camps for Children
3 Oct 2018

> A satellite image taken on September 13, 2018 shows substantial growth in the tent city the US government is using to detain migrant children located in the desert in Tornillo, Texas. The tent city was originally used to house children separated from parents this summer, when the Trump administration was aggressively prosecuting parents traveling with children for illegal entry to the US. The US Department of Health and Human Services has stated that the new growth in the number of tents is necessary in order to house children who may cross the border on their own, unaccompanied by family members.

So the USG is in no position to criticize other governments about human rights abuses, without inducing spontaneous expressions of derision. But We the People can and should denounce such abuses whenever and wherever they occur, regardless of which government (or gang) is responsible.

September 20, 2018

Permalink

I'm afraid my own use of Tor is quite boring. I'm not an activist, whistleblower, organizer, stalkee, patient, or citizen of an unusually oppressive country... Nevertheless, pervasive monitoring is an attack, and I've been browsing the web almost exclusively via Tor over the past decade to resist it. Who knows, maybe I have actually done some "interesting" things over Tor, but having to threat-model every interaction to decide whether to apply security would be a real hassle—and would hearken back to those recent days when only "high-value" stuff went over HTTPS. It seems a bit too early for a "let's anonymize" campaign, when we've still got the likes of Cloudflare fucking with us, but one can dream.

I send my thanks, pseudonymously, to all who have helped with Tor, the Browser, TAILS, and the related ecosystem.

(BTW, what's with this message on the survey page? "Caution: JavaScript execution is disabled in your browser or for this website. You may not be able to answer all questions in this survey. Please, verify your browser parameters." What does "may not" mean? Shouldn't you know? Is it worth trying?)

September 20, 2018

Permalink

Tor is amazing when it comes to preventing de-anonymization attacks from low level people. Its useful to protect yourself against what one could say is "automated" phishing. Also, hiding the use of certain services in foreign countries is useful, aka china or such. Its also very fun to build upon Tor since it can be used to run services behind a firewall without ever needing to open any ports, at any time. Unlike port knocking. When it comes to hardening a server, Tor is amazing to secure the entry point. To top it off, the use of the Tor network as a load balancer is amazingly efficient and cheap.(see https://web.archive.org/web/20160308072653/https://www.benthamsgaze.org…)
It may be crude and imperfect, but its better then anything else available when it comes to security.

Not being able to use Tor? Honestly, my servers would've probably been crushed. But in some cases, that could be life threatening.

September 21, 2018

Permalink

Ask Ed Snowden and also WikiLeaks about it - they literally can't do what they do without Tor, but it is not obvious for many people.

Speaking of whom, here is an excellent and very recently published essay from Snowden explaining why surveillance is all about power and oppression, not "security":

wired.com
Edward Snowden on Protecting Activists Against Surveillance
Edward Snowden
18 Sep 2018

> People generally associate the word radical with extreme. But I prefer to think of the word in reference to its Latin origin: radix, the root of the issue.

September 21, 2018

Permalink

Tor Browser is the last defence line of free internet. I lack the skills to understand what you are really doing but I am proud of you guys defending our freedom and try to support you as much as I can.

September 21, 2018

Permalink

Hard to believe but... I'm a police officer infiltrated in a narco gang in South America. I need to travel a lot and use it to contact my superiors elsewhere.

September 21, 2018

Permalink

Since Snowden revealed the internet is fully "recorded" to say the least, my use of the Tor network increased. Before i used it to get better search results from search engines, instead of being locked in with search results dedicated to my country, it also filters a lot of the ads corporations pay to be in the first results with little to no correlation with the search.

Afflicted with a mental medical condition that is still even in "liberal" democracy looked as "insanity", i use it to be sure that none of my reading could be used to build profiles about me
or people with the same medical condition.

The same goes for political or news reading.

So Tor for me is not a matter of life and death but it helps me think i can use the internet
without putting my future or those of others at risk.

Here's one more reason why posters to medical forums should be concerned about maintaining their anonymity (which almost always requires at a minimum using Tor): if the bad guys don't have your PID, they can't impersonate you to push their agenda with a campaign of fake comments:

salon.com
Unwitting patients, copycat comments play hidden role in federal rule-making
Some cancer patients unknowingly became part of an organized campaign to oppose what’s known as the “340B” program
Sarah Jane Tribble
1 Oct 2018

> A proposal to sharply cut a drug discount program that many hospitals rely on drew some 1,400 comments when the Trump administration announced its plan last year. Hundreds appeared to come from patients across the country — pleas from average Americans whose treatments for diseases such as cancer depend on costly medicines. But a review of the responses found that some individuals were not aware they apparently had become part of an organized campaign to oppose what’s known as the “340B” program. Some had no memory of signing anything, much less sending their opinions about it. Of the 1,406 comments that specifically mentioned 340B — part of several thousand comments submitted on a broad proposal to revise medical payment systems — about half included the same or similar wording and were submitted anonymously, an analysis by Kaiser Health News found. Those comments lamented “abuse” of the drug discounts, faulted hospitals for being “greedy” and used phrasing such as “quality, affordable, and accessible.”

September 21, 2018

Permalink

I just started using Tor because and its the best thing since sliced bread. THANK YOU GUYS!

September 22, 2018

Permalink

Another "boring user" here. I once got hacked by revealing my IP address, lost important documents because of my shortsightedness. Now I can't see myself ever browsing in the open again. Every site we visit has access to our IPs, VPNs and proxies can snoop on our data, Tor is the way I found to protect myself.

September 22, 2018

Permalink

i use ricochet, onionshare & tor bundle (surfing-onions).
it helps me to circumvent censorship & harassment and stay anonymized.
without tor i should be without digital life.
*Censorship circumvention
*Coping with domestic abuse or stalking
*Curtailing surveillance

September 22, 2018

Permalink

I use Tor for almost all my day to day internet browsing. The only exception is when I'm on a video streaming website. Hopefully one day the network will support that usecase as well.

As an outspoken anarchist you will learn fast that the state does not really support free speech. It's a sure way to get on that surveillance list.

Tor has allowed me to show them a figurative middle finger to the parties that are surveilling me. At least in the online medium. Offline I can just show them the middle finger in person.

If I weren't able to use Tor. I would have probably asked random strangers to allow me to use their device to look up the most basic information I need. But that would mean cutting down almost 90% of the information I access on a daily basis.

Surveillance is something you might not even consider when you're just speaking your mind. But it's a fact of reality.

I'm glad in some sense that the general awareness of privacy issues are starting to emerge in the general population. Thanks to Snowden, and all the companies that are fucking things up on a daily basis.

But we still have a long way to go.

And of course, thank you Tor foundation.

And for the state, I only have a single message: fuck you.

September 22, 2018

Permalink

I have used TOR to prevent the pirates at google. mozilla, et al monitoring what sites I visit on the net and selling that to anyone that wants it. The big companies seem to think they own the internet and TOR is one of the best ways to avoid them.

September 23, 2018

Permalink

I use Tor for day-to-day browsing because I value my privacy. Surveillance is the new norm. Web tracking has become so pervasive. Everyone is collecting personal information.

I don't want to live in a world where everything I say, everything I do, everyone I talk to, every expression of creativity or love or friendship is recorded.

Thank you, Tor Project.

September 23, 2018

Permalink

If you're getting a poor response to your online survey, I accessed the site using the .onion address using Tor Browser 8.0.1 and the site would periodically (and completely spontaneously) give me an error message about attempting to leave the page and ERASE EVERYTHING I HAD TYPED. So a big thumbs down to the survey site.

September 24, 2018

Permalink

Hi, Steph, I'd love to tell a few tales, but when I tried to post one, I got this:

> Certificate does not come from a trusted source
> The certificate does not come from a trusted source.
> Error code: MOZILLA_PKIX_ERROR_ADDITIONAL_POLICY_CONSTRAINT_FAILED

People have been complaining about that dodgy Fastly certificate, and I think this episode confirms that Tor Project really needs to get a real certificate which is authenticates that we are connecting to torproject.org, not to Fastly.

I mean, freaking Hell, c'mon people, FIX THIS.

Thanks for your attention.

September 27, 2018

Permalink

I live in Iran. I use tor for telegram, accessing social medias and most of all be anonymous! tor helped me in Censorship circumvention, Political organizing(view and comment my ideas without fear!), Coping with domestic abuse or stalking(in Iran it is our ISP's), Curtailing surveillance(again from our regime), Whistleblowing or anti-corruption reporting(our gun is our mobiles and social medias). and beside tor for us is more than keep our privacy! When regime tries to block all anti filters, tor is the only tool to connecting social medias and free internet. and also there were times that tor was blocked and I used bridges with email robot to connecting tor. At the end tor worked for me 98% success and for other 2% I used email robot(bridges). and also I use tor proxy as tor browser(50% proxy and 50% browser)! We(all Iranians) thank you for tor.

September 28, 2018

Permalink

Used Tor for researching secret political surveillance by a government. Led to three major media exposes over a ten year period. First two were suppressed, but third time was charm time and the government finally admitted, after decades of denial, that it is all true. (This was a grassroots group effort, and not everyone used Tor, and would still have happened without me, but I could not have been part of it without Tor, and I am proud to have played a positive role).

September 28, 2018

Permalink

Used Tor to obtain copies of Panama Papers from Wikileaks, which proved invaluable in researching evidence of public corruption. Coincidence or not, a political shift in favor of human rights followed.

September 28, 2018

Permalink

Used Tor and other secure (?) communications methods to communicate with journalists and human rights advocates.

September 28, 2018

Permalink

I have used Tor extensively to obstruct, obstruct, obstruct the basic dragnet, which can potentially force the bad guys to shift to far riskier surveillance methods, which can eventually result in their public exposure, and perhaps eventually to a much needed public debate over whether the military-surveillance-complex is really worth the enormous cost, given the lack of clear cut benefit to the state, and the mounting evidence of clear and present danger it poses to ordinary citizens. Early days, but so far this approach seems to be working.

September 28, 2018

Permalink

Used Tor to research and expose potential "dual use" by "the authorities" for in-home dragnet surveillance of a heavily promoted and seemingly innocuous new industry.

Results: some wins (!) in the courts and even some badly needed new privacy laws (!!).

(This is an ongoing grassroots campaign, and not everyone involved uses Tor, but I could not participate without Tor.)

September 28, 2018

Permalink

Used Tor to monitor blogs used by local "extremist groups" and an OMG. Result: accurate information, directly from the source, about various potential threats. The real threats turn out to be quite different from what "the authorities" say.

September 28, 2018

Permalink

I have used Tor to monitor advanced indicators of planned illegal land seizures or even genocides which may possibly have entered pre-operational stages. This involves monitoring various activities by dozens of secretive companies (mostly based in the USA) which provide "unconventional warfare services" for a stiff fee, which too many governments are evidently happy to pay. This hideous industry predates the current administration; what's new is their increasingly brazen US operations. Scary? Yes. Worth watching? Most certainly.

One of many intriguing discoveries: the employees of these companies are reluctant members of the Gig Economy! And they feel they are being greatly abused by their employers. This ironic circumstance offers an opportunity to the grassroots defenders of human rights.

September 28, 2018

Permalink

Used Tor to obtain documents from Wikileaks, which helped expose local surveillance by military units of janitorial union organizing meetings, groups pressing for the rights of migrant workers, etc.

September 28, 2018

Permalink

Use Tor to research a variety of paramilitary actions which endanger civil rights, the environment, public safety, etc.

September 28, 2018

Permalink

Use Tor to participate in grassroots anti-nuclear weapons activism. This is quite dangerous so Tor is absolutely essential.

September 28, 2018

Permalink

New technologies now appearing present novel risks to ordinary people but also present some promising opportunities for novel (and not yet illegal!) grassroots local communications methods. Using Tor to help trial and test some of these.

September 29, 2018

Permalink

I am an American who has awoke to the fact that a very large amount of "conspiracy theory's" of the past century are true and that we have been lied to extensively by our gov't for over a century. To quote Steve Quayle, "the biggest coverup in history IS the coverup of history." I believe Snowden and Assange are true hero's. I am a small farmer that grows organic produce. (Don't believe the lies. GMO's are NOT safe, their accumulative effect slowly destroys the good bacteria in your gut and lead to all sorts of dis-ease. It is also harmful to eat food grown with and/or has had chemicals applied to it.) My life is mundane but I highly value freedom and privacy and feel it should be a fundamental right for all people worldwide. Thank you TOR 'creators' for making your browser available to everyone. May God bless and protect all of you.

> "the biggest coverup in history IS the coverup of history."

If you haven't yet read it, I think you'll love this book: Howard Zinn, A People's History of the Unitied States.

The further back you go, the more outrageous the lies. The true history of the American Revolution is infinitely more fascinating and instructive than the bowdlerized and mostly false version taught to American high school students. And don't even get more started on the lies told about indigenous people's struggle to resist "Westward Expansion".

September 29, 2018

Permalink

had helped me keeping me outside sites that use cloudflare a thai amazon copycat filtering stuff.
those sites are so bad that cant even handle as HTTP GET request

September 30, 2018

Permalink

i educate myself using tor & promoting free software (i do not understand why so many gangsters are on the right side and make money using oppressive measures like in cuba in 1950) , i try to learn a better life reading this blog and others : it gives me hope and shows me where the morality begins.

September 30, 2018

Permalink

Used Tor to research how "gentrification" threatens to become a kind of ethnic cleansing in a city. Found the government plan for urban redevelopment hiding in an obscure corner, in which some groups of people are conspicuously absent entirely from the "desired" outcome of redevelopment. That is, the Powers expect them to simply no longer exist ten years from now. Scary.

September 30, 2018

Permalink

Used Tor to research violent crime statistics, a somewhat dangerous subject because the "authorities" hate citizens who contradict their false statements about violence committed by the police, using what can be inferred from their own data. Among the false claims made daily by police unions: police work is not particularly dangerous, compared to roofing or recycling. Police officers are not underpaid. Police forces are not understaffed--- indeed, the NYPD could be reduced to 1/3 its current levels and still enjoy a greater density of cops among the general population than most cities in the US. Murder rates in some US cities are far above WHO's definition of a health epidemic. Far above terrorism death rates in Baghdad at the height of ISIS violence. But both phenomena are far below rates in some MX cities. It's amazing how different the truth is from what you find (or more often, don't find) in the mainstream media.

Very interesting research and a great tor use case. I'd like to read more into it, if you have a website or blog (and if not you're missing a great opportunity) and want to post a link.

September 30, 2018

Permalink

Used Tor to research supercomputer models of entire cities in which every individual is represented together with his/her economic and physical health, daily movements at 10 minute intervals (including walking the family dog), relations with teachers, coworkers, family, friends, government officials. Currently the models use "synthetic populations", which means that aggregated forecasts are based on the future state and behavior of all "the sim people", who have similar statistical characteristics to the real people. But of course the results are "validated" using "post-diction" with the real data on the real people. The economic/transit models are not secret, but the "protest" forecasting models are, and those agencies don't bother with the extra step of creating a population of sim people.

Scary? You don't know the half of it: the bad guys want to predict the future behavior of every citizen focusing on preschoolers aged 2-7 years old. Using all the real data on real preschoolers. Each and every one. Drawn from dozens of private and government databases holding information on their families. This in a society which claims to be very protective of its children.

Not sure that the word "hypocrisy" is sufficiently strong to describe this, but it's a good example of how evil flourishes when it is hidden from public view.

Also used Tor to urge investigative journalists to look into this issue, pointing to evidence some people who have been doing this work for decades may now be willing to talk about their other supercomputer-enabled "microsimulation" modeling. Here is an "innocuous" example of how it works:

https://www.wired.com/story/scientists-know-how-youll-respond-to-nuclea…
Scientists Know How You’ll Respond to Nuclear War—and They Have a Plan
Megan Molteni
13 Feb 2018

> Using an unprecedented level of data from more than 40 different sources, researchers can now make synthetic populations of entire cities....

> researchers ... have access to an unprecedented level of data from more than 40 different sources, including smartphones, satellites, remote sensors, and census surveys. They can use it to model synthetic populations of the whole city of DC—and make these unfortunate, imaginary people experience a hypothetical blast over and over again.

> a series of virtualized representation layers. On the bottom is a series of datasets that describe the physical landscape of DC—buildings, roads, the electrical grid, water lines, hospital systems. On top of that is dynamic data, like how traffic flows around the city, surges in electrical usage, and telecommunications bandwidth. Then there’s the synthetic human population. The makeup of these e-peeps is determined by census information, mobility surveys, tourism statistics, social media networks, and smartphone data, which is calibrated down to a single city block.

Calibrated using the real data on the real people. And you don't have a choice about how your census data or smartphone geolocation data is used by these agencies.

> ,,, simulated what would happen if the populations exhibited six different kinds of behaviors—like healthcare-seeking vs. shelter-seeking—it took more than a day to run and produced 250 terabytes of data. And that was taking advantage of the institute’s new 8,600-core cluster... it could be run in something closer to real time.

With the goal of tweaking parameters (representing things under government control in real life), re-running the model, and choosing the run which gives the "best" outcome. "Best" for the government, that is.

The modeling described in the Wired story is a little different from forecasting social disorder trends, but the relationship is clear enough to see that "precrime" forecasting is not dystopian fantasy, but has been a above top secret reality for decades. And it being adopted by other governments which have supercomputers of their own. See China's real time "citizenship scoring" program, which unlike the US version, is not only not a state secret but is actively publicized by the government. The Wired article suggests that the US version may soon be partially revealed by USG, if reporters don't get there first.

October 01, 2018

Permalink

I have started to use Tor simply to browse the internet in private. I have become tired of internet and web tracking, Tor is the only way to stay private provided you use it properly of course (remember the rules of the Tor network to help protect everyone else!). Nowadays even browsers that are supposed to protect you (ehm.. you know who) are no longer private, and trying to tweak and configure the browser to respect your privacy better is becoming more and more painful.

I use Tor on Microsoft Windows, which is probably not the best way to do it, but hey, since it's available for the platform I'm going to use it. I might switch to GNU/Linux soon, install a free distribution approved by the fsf (free software foundation). It's the only way to get 100% privacy.

Thank you Tor project for an easy and simple way to get privacy on the web and on the internet!

> I might switch to GNU/Linux soon, install a free distribution approved by the fsf (free software foundation).

You might also want to try Tails (see tails.boum.org), which offers an easy way to try Linux without committing yourself to the effort of installing a new OS on your laptop and PC.

Tails is a complete Linux OS, based on Debian, which can be booted from a USB stick (convenient) or R/O DVD (safer), which includes the latest Tor Browser (with extra protections against software glitches possibly deanonymizing you), as well as LibreOffice (FOSS clone of M$ Office) and other utilities, but which also has the very important "amnesiac" property that Tails tries to leave no traces on the hard drive of your PC or laptop of your activity. This can be a life-saver for whistle-blowers, journalists, political dissidents, union organizers, political campaign staffers, human rights workers, medical aid workers, social justice advocates, UN weapons inspectors, civil rights violations investigators, etc. Also perfect for the undercover cop embedded in a narcotics gang (see the post up above), and for brave MX citizens who report on the appalling cartel violence in cities like Ciudad Juarez (greater death rates than the death rate from terror bombings during the worst of post-US-invasion civil war in Iraq, but unlike that horror rarely mentioned in the US press).

Useful both for safer browsing (modulo a long standing issue re guard nodes which is slowly being addressed, and an issue with gaining good entropy which is a problem for "amnesiac" OSs), and for off-line activity (e.g. writing a human rights report while "in-country"). I have found that rebooting often to switch between on and off-line Tails sessions is not as inconvenient as it may sound, it simply requires a small amount of organization and discipline.

The only fsf-approved distro I know of is Trisquil, and it's not very popular and so probably hasn't been pounded on and hardened like, say, Debian. Also Trisquil isn't necessarily designed with extensive security features. Thus I would highly recommend to you Qubes OS with a Whonix VM. It's not fsf-approved, but there's a bit of a tradeoff between privacy and security here. It depends on your threat model. To me, it's more important that an adversary's malicious payload be contained withing a Qubes VM, than to worry that my WiFi card's driver might be spying on me or something. However, really any GNU/Linux will offer better privacy (and probably security) than Windows, so the choice of distro isn't all that important.

October 01, 2018

Permalink

Hi Steph,

Glad to see this

> Raise funds from new sponsors and individual donors to diversify our funding and ensure Tor remains independent, robust, and secure

and hope to soon see Isela (the incoming Executive Director) post that this continues to be a top priority for Tor Project.

I have a suggestion about gathering stories. In addition to asking "how have you used Tor?", I suggest asking "what made you start using Tor?". I think some of these stories could help people who haven't tried Tor Browser better understand why they should possibly consider trying it.

The book by Julia Angwin, Dragnet Nation, opens with a horrifying anecdote, not involving Tor, but clearly explaining one very good reason why people might want to use Tor, namely secret scraping of web forum posts. This anecdote is directly relevant to the post above about a mental health condition.

I experienced a similar scraping issue at another legal and seemingly innocuous on-line forum--- not a medical forum, but as it turned out also a forum of great interest to spooks, which was quite a shock to almost all members--- in which the scraping was not authorized by the forum operators, but was done by a Third Party, as part of a USIC contract. Nasty.

Another issue forum users should be aware of is that people who ask to "friend" you might very well be spooks or cops, especially if you are an activist. It doesn't matter whether or not your group is non-violent since the spooks always claim that anyone *might become* violent in the future, so they "need" to spy on non-violent groups too [sic]. "Friending" members under false pretenses is a very common and cheap way to keep an eye on your group. So common that it often happens that a UC working for one agency reports an agent provocateur working for another agency. Some of the best documentation for this comes from The Guardian's years of reporting on abuses by police agencies in the UK monitoring peaceful environmental groups and social justice groups. Further extensive documentation of abuses by civilian and military spooks operating in the USA comes from documents obtained under FOIA by ACLU and EFF. This issue is in the news again right now because some major tech-cos are now stating that their real-name policy extends to police officers, who presumably will continue to violate the Terms of Use. (Who is Facebook going to call when they catch an FBI agent using a false identity in his/her Facebook account?)

Oh yes, why are US medical forums of interest to spooks? Well, one major job of any non-USG intelligence agency is to assess the stability of the USA, and physical/mental health issues experienced by the general population are part of that assessment. Why would GRU rely on official USG statistics when it can go to the source and scrape at scale stories told by US patients themselves? Sure, the result is a messy dataset, but machine learning can deal with that well enough to keep the GRU bosses happy. And FBI is very interested in keeping an eye on anyone they suspect might be "unstable", so they monitor mental health forums too. All the world's spooks and cops have decided that because technology enables them to presume present or future guilt (of something, anything) in everyone, their intelligence/LEA missions demands that they take advantage of the technology. Ethical considerations are never a part of decisions whether or not to use some new "investigative technique". That's how cell-site simulators (Stingrays), "lawful interception" [sic], state-sponsored malware, aerial surveillance, and so much more, secretly came into such wide use. They did these things because they could, without any regard for the many severe ill consequences for society as a whole, not to mention for individual lives damaged by abuses of technology.

Just one more reason why the shibboleth that "if you have done nothing wrong, you have nothing to fear from state-sponsored cyber campaigns" is dangerously incorrect. Just because you cannot think of a reason why someone might want to spy on Grandma doesn't mean that they have not thought of a reason. And in fact, they have thought of a large number of reasons. It's safe (for them), it's easy, it's cheap (after the initial investment), so why wouldn't they spy on Grandma and everyone else?

> "what made you start using Tor?"

Accidentally stumbled upon an ugly secret surveillance scheme, then accidentally discovered and reported a horrifying internet insecurity (unfixable in software and hardware), only to watch "the authorities" use it as another method for cyberespionage, rather than protecting their own citizens--- rather than protecting, in fact, their own damn military servicepeople! Then some more stuff like that. And then they demanded that I work for them helping them to do even worse things.

Such experiences are apt to induce a certain skepticism, even cynicism, concerning the intentions of governments toward ordinary people, and an intense desire to avoid their myriads of technologically enabled intrusions into private lives, to thwart their semi-pseudo-scientifically engineered manipulations of the attitudes of private citizens, to obstruct their endless proliferation of WMD, to work to slow climate change and the current great extinction event, etc.

Stay safe, everyone! And read everything our masters don't want us to read. Look at everything they don't want us to see. Think for yourself and act for The People.

October 05, 2018

Permalink

I use tor as vpn. You do not need public IP and can easily connect to your server behind 3 NATS. Onion services 3 made this use case much safer.

October 05, 2018

Permalink

I asked my medical provider to communicate with me using Onion Share, but they refused.

I now use a different provider!

October 06, 2018

Permalink

I live in Russia. There, in july '16, was accepted Yarovaya's law, an analogue to EU Mandatory Data Retention. So, I told myself: either I use GNU/Linux instead of Windows and Tor instead of Chrome, either I stop using internet. So, I'm texting this message using Tails 3.9, Tor Browser and Tor Network; thank you Tor & Tails developers and all people who were hosting, are hosting or will be hosting onion relays! Novadays you carrying out the important mission for us all.

October 07, 2018

Permalink

I can't be on the free internet in China with out TOR as my browser since 2007 already.
Downloading is a little bit slowly, but acceptable.
Like to get TOR on my mobile directly and not through The Guardian or so???
I will stick to you as my ONLY browser.

October 12, 2018

Permalink

Probably too late to mention it now, but for next time, I just wanted to suggest you also ask users how long they have been using Tor. I just think it's interesting and gives the stories some context.

Me, the first time I used Tor was probably 2007 or so, back in the TorButton days before TorBrowser was even an idea, nor were hidden services if I remember correctly. It was also very very slow back then which meant I only used it when I felt I needed to. I didn't start using Tor every day until around 2012. Now I use it for nearly all my browsing (except certain sites like banking and shopping). More and more I can feel the chilling effects of the clearweb, I can say without hesitation that my life would be much different if it hadn't been for Tor. It's awesome to see how far Tor has come in terms of performance, usability, and the community.