Stop all browser snooping by using Tor

THEY’RE WATCHING YOU. They’re watching everything you do online. You’d think we were being paranoid, but it’s part of their mission statement; the US government is part of the international Five Eyes ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Eyes) group of Australia, Canada, New Zealand, United Kingdom, and United States, which have worked together since World War II to collate and share intelligence, and that includes the Internet use of citizens.

In the digital age, that means intercepting, storing, and analyzing all Internet traffic. Don’t be fooled into thinking that local laws can stop a nation state from spying on its own citizens. If you’re one of the Five Eyes, just get your buddy overseas to do the spying, then report back. Tempora ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Tempora), a UK program, splices off the undersea fiber-optic backbone of the Internet, duplicating all the data transmitted over it, with the NSA sharing that data. Damn crafty, those Brits, described by Edward Snowden as “worse than the US.”

But back at home, programs such as PRISM created a legal framework for the NSA to spy on targeted US citizens, immunizing co-operating US companies from prosecution. Or take MUSCULAR for bulk copying of Google and Yahoo! data to outside of US territory, for the NSA and GCHQ to rifle through at their leisure. And who knows what Russia, North Korea, and China are up to….

It’s not paranoia if it’s actually happening. The good news is that the open-source community has brought together a host of privacy technology to offer a verified solution: Tor. –NEIL MOHR 1

TOR GUIDE Tor (or, as it used to be known, The Onion Router) is a collaborative, open-source project designed to provide anonymous access to the Internet. An easy way to think of it is as a browser VPN that anyone can use.

>> That’s a good starting point, but what’s wrong with your current VPN service? It says it offers you privacy and anonymous browsing, right? Yes, but how do you know it actually does? If it’s a US-based commercial service, the VPN is at the mercy of the US government, and can be gagged by existing legislation while the state rifles through its servers.

>> Or how do you know your VPN isn’t run by some guy sitting in a basement somewhere, dressed in a onesie, while he watches anime? This isn’t to say VPNs are useless, it’s pointing out that they’re not a silver bullet. If no third parties test their systems for security or flaws, how do you know they’re secure at all?

>> This brings us back to Tor and what it can do for our online privacy. It might help to very quickly say why you don’t have online privacy in the first place, beyond the notion that every government in the world is probably monitoring you online. It’s largely down to how the Internet was developed and has to be run. The Internet is a precarious stack of open protocols built up over decades, and back in the 1960s, everything was done in plain text—that didn’t change for a very long time; HTTP is transmitted in plain text.

>> Even today, the domain-name routing of your browsing and email message headers remains open to scrutiny, and if you want the Internet to be worldwide, you have to allow data packets to be passed across borders— this enables nation states to do some dubious rerouting of entire tranches of data, which also strengthens the argument for a system such as Tor. But what exactly is that system? 2

STINKY ONIONS The whole reason Tor was originally called The Onion Router is that your data and destination address are locked up inside an onion of encryption. As