After 9.11 2001 there has been much interest for fight against terror. Because of that, many countries have introduced new restrictive anti-terror laws supposed to stop terrorism.
A common measure is to log and spy on everybody and everything they do on the internet. This has eliminated much privacy, but it has not stopped terrorism.
Fortunately, there are tools to protect the
privacy of law-abiding citizens.
Let us introduce one of these tools- TOR - The Onion Router. TOR was
originally developed by US Navy to protect the identity of its
agents. It can be used by everybody that do not want to be surveilled.
The tools are fully legal and impossible to track.
TOR works by sending the internet traffic from you on a detour through a network of servers, so it is no longer possible to see who you are communicating with. It works in the following manner:
In the diagram below, Alice wants to communicate with Bob without being tracked. Normally, she would just contact Bob through a direct connection, but with TOR she sends her messages to a random TOR-server - in the diagram TOR-server 1
TOR-server 1 sends the message on to TOR-server 2 that sends it on to TOR-server 3 - which delivers the message to Bob. The trick is that TOR-server 1 only knows Alice and TOR-server 2 - but not bob and TOR-server 3. TOR-server 3 doesn't know anything about Alice.
In that way, Bob is not able to know where Alice is. And if you tap Alice's connection, then you can only see that she is talking to TOR-server 1. So you can't see that she is really talking with Bob. All the green connections in the diagram are encrypted, so it's not even possible to see what she is sending to Bob.
Even if the police or another agency seizes one or several of the servers they will not be able to see who is talking to who. To reveal this, they would have to control allthe TOR-servers in the world.
The only drawback about TOR is that the encryption takes time and therefore the connection, that Alice and Bobs communicate on, is not as fast as if they talked directly. But that is a small price to pay if you care about your privacy.
Try Tor for
yourself
We have installled TOR on this CD. When you use the
Firefox browser, your traffic will automatically be sent through TOR.
If you use it to do email on e.g. Google mail, it won't be possible to
see who you are mailing with by tapping your connection.
You can test TOR by visiting http://whatismyip.com/. This page will tell you which IP address you are using. The IP address is the adress that identifies your computer on the internet, which can be used to track you. If you visit the site several times, you will see that it thinks you are comming from different places all over the world.
For more reading about TOR, please visit tor.eff.org.
You can run TOR on Windows by running xeroBank browser xB can be run without having to be installed on your Windows computer and without changing your registry database. xB first has to be unpacked on your harddisk or even better your USB media.
Actually it is a good idea to have xB browser on your USB key even if you normally don't use windows, because often you aren't near your own computer and you want to protect your privacy. Using xB from your USB media will definitly help you protect your privacy on a windows computer.