Fighting Internet Censorship With Tor

Fighting Internet Censorship With Tor by Sublett

This text is from BAAM newsletter, issue 3

Throughout history, governments have repressed their subjects by attacking the ability to communicate freely. Tapping phones, reading mail, and shutting down opposition newspapers and television stations have long been staple tactics of totalitarian regimes. In so-called democracies, media control is established largely by withholding advertising support from opposing voices. All leaders know that their power depends on keeping the rabble from collaborating to expose their lies and overthrow them.

In recent years, the rise of the internet has presented a new challenge to the forces of oppression. While internet-connected video cameras and databases have made it easier to control large populations, the internet also provides a decentralized, accessible communications medium that allows anyone to exchange ideas, opinions, pictures of torture victims, and much more. As web sites like Youtube and wikileaks.org continue to erode official credibility, governments worldwide are reacting predictably.

Former AT&T technician Mark Klein has revealed that the NSA is intercepting voice and internet communications for nearly all US residents (1). Klein described a special NSA-only room at the AT&T facility in San Francisco, where all through traffic, even within the US, is collected for analysis.

Abroad, the situation is even worse. The "Great Firewall of China" restricts Chinese internet access to government-approved web sites only. In 2004 Yahoo ratted out activist Shi Tao to Chinese authorities, who arrested Shi for revealing information about the Tiananmen Square massacre and sentenced him to ten years in prison (2). Other examples abound.

Fortunately, there is a way to combat such repression. Tor, short for "The onion router," is a distributed network of servers which anonymizes internet traffic. The servers are operated by volunteers all over the world. Tor users can access the internet without revealing their real IP address to web sites, or letting their ISP know which sites they visit. Tor works by routing connections through multiple nodes, each of which only knows the previous node and next node in the route. Exit nodes send traffic to its final destination. Traffic is encrypted within the Tor cloud and decrypted at the exit nodes.

However, Tor is not yet a perfect solution. For one thing, Tor connections are slow. This is partly due to their circuitous nature, but mostly there are just not enough servers to handle the load. Worse, there have been reports of attackers operating exit nodes and capturing traffic as it leaves the Tor cloud (3). While this attack will not expose IP addresses, the captured data may contain identifying information. The current scarcity of servers means that such an attack could collect a significant fraction of total Tor traffic.

In order to make Tor more secure and usable, more people are needed to run servers. Instructions and downloads can be found at www.torproject.org. While installing Tor software is not difficult, one should read the instructions carefully.

1. blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2007/11/att-whistle-blo.html
2. www.rsf.org/article.php3?id_article=14884
3. www.smh.com.au/news/security/the-hack-of-the-year/2007/11/12/1194766589522.html