katina's blog

“I'm a Tor supporter for a very simple reason: my colleague's lives depend on it.

I'm the co-founder of Global Voices, an international community of bloggers, reporters, translators and activists dedicated to building a more inclusive picture of the world. Members of our community are located in more than 100 nations, and many members of our team live in countries where freedom of expression is under threat.

Some Global Voices members need to maintain anonymity so they can report from countries where their words could lead to imprisonment or worse. These threats are not imaginary - four members of our team were incarcerated for more than a year in Ethiopia, and our members in Bangladesh fear for their safety when they write about killings of secular bloggers, presumably by government-backed extremists.

We teach everyone who works with Global Voices about digital security, and Tor is a cornerstone of the toolkit we teach our authors and translators to use. In countries that monitor web traffic closely, frequently connecting to the Global Voices website could signal that a user is a Global Voices contributor. Correctly using Tor allows our authors in repressive nations to contribute to our site without revealing to local authorities that they are writing for Global Voices. We quite literally could not do our job in many nations we work in without Tor.

While financial support is critical for Tor to continue developing its tools, and while the real heroes of the Tor project are the thousands of volunteers who donate bandwidth and time to maintain Tor exit nodes, there's another way to help Tor: use Tor. Here's what I mean: in the most repressive countries we work in, we cannot use Tor because simply using strong encryption is so uncommon that governments seek out users of these tools. For Tor to be useful in an extremely repressive country like Ethiopia, it needs to be normal, as normal as HTTPS has become in the past few years. When you use Tor to do something quotidian, you're providing cover traffic for people who need to use Tor to do something extraordinary. So give, run an exit node, but at the very least, help make Tor utterly ordinary by using it as often as you can.”

-Ethan Zuckerman

Ben Wizner, in thinking about the ways that Tor facilitates his work, is very clear: “It’s not an overstatement to say that secure technology such as Tor has made the ACLU’s work with Edward Snowden possible, “ he says.

Like Laura Poitras, using encryption was a learning process for Wizner, facilitated by key teachers, the first of whom was Laura herself.

“I was someone who went through most of my life unaware of these tools,” he says. “Laura (Poitras) came to my office in 2011 and installed Adium for me. `This is how we are going to communicate,” she said. “And this will help you communicate with the rest of the world as well.”

Jacob Appelbaum, Chris Soghoian, Renata Avila, and Daniel Kahn Gillmor were all instrumental to Wizner as he followed a similar learning curve to Poitras, quickly becoming familiar with Tor, PGP, Tails and Signal for many aspects of his work as Director of the ACLU’s Speech, Privacy and Technology project. It was his next teacher that, as he says, “gets us to the heart of the story. Starting in July 2013 I had a need to be able to communicate securely with Edward Snowden.”

From the start, as Ben aided Snowden with legal advice, he learned from him as well.

“[I was…] dealing with someone who is a world-class security technologist and also an excellent and very patient teacher,” he says. “I was entering a mode of communication where he felt extremely at home and I did not. This was going to be the only means of communication for an unknown length of time and we needed to exchange critical information, get to know each other and build trust, all while I am hunting and pecking on this tiny burner keyboard. And I have learned over the months and years how profound and intimate a chat conversation can be.”

Somehow it worked, and worked so well in fact, that meeting Snowden in person was a different experience for Wizner that he had expected.

“That was the surprising thing,” he says. “Even though we had gotten to know each other so well over so many hours of online conversation, I still had the expectation that our real relationship would begin when we met face to face. And yet it turned out to be a continuation rather than a new chapter.”

Wizner thinks often about the role that secure technology continues to play in both providing the foundation for their work together, and more broadly, in Ed’s continued participation in the larger dialogue around encryption.

“On one level, secure technology like Tor and Tails, has allowed Ed to defeat exile in a really profound way. Physical isolation has been imposed, but Ed is able to continue communicating to larger audiences from wherever he is. All of the legal and strategic advice,” he adds, “that goes into making these opportunities available and accessible for him would not be possible without using secure communications tools like Tor.”

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I've been using Tor for more than a decade. I travel all the time, and often find myself connected to manifestly untrustworthy networks -- from the nets at hacker conferences to the one the Chinese government provided for our use at a World Economic Forum event in Dalian. Tor is my assurance that I'm browsing safely, privately and anonymously. When I do investigative journalism work on national security subjects, my go-to first line of defense is Torbrowser.

That why we at Boing Boing operate a high speed, high quality exit node. By the way, just this year we received two law enforcement requests for records relating to that node, and despite all the doomsaying about how the cops would punish you for operating an anonymizing tool, in both cases, we sent polite letters explaining that we don't keep logs, and in both cases, the cops returned a polite thanks and went away.

I donate to Tor, and I trust Tor, but even if I didn't trust 'em, I'd still use it. The great thing about free/open projects like Tor is that they're designed to work even if the people who make them don't agree with you or want what's best for you.

Make a donation today!

Rabbi Rob Thomas, founder and CEO of Team Cymru, is a member of The Tor Project's Board of Directors, and a loud and proud advocate for Tor and our first fundraising campaign.

Rabbi Rob and his wife have issued a challenge to the Tor community worldwide: donate to Tor by 11:59pm PST on December 31st and they will match your gift, dollar for dollar, up to $18,000..

Rob and his wife Lauren normally make their contributions to the causes they support anonymously, for spiritual purposes. But their deep and long-term support for Tor's sustainability has moved them to make a public challenge. Your gift to Tor will now have twice the impact.

"The internet cannot heal itself in the face of tyrants," Thomas says. "Tor is the salve that heals that wound; Tor is what allows us to route around tyranny."

Our deep gratitude to you Rabbi Rob and Lauren, and to all who join the challenge to #SupportTor.

Make a donation today!

Today, Tuesday, December 1st, we want to invite you to celebrate #GivingTuesday with the Tor Project! Now in its fourth year, #GivingTuesday is a day of charitable giving fueled by the power of social media and collaboration--a day to invest in organizations doing work that you think is really important.

Since we launched our crowdfunding campaign last week, we have seen amazing support from our community. Donations are flowing in and people are also setting up Tor relays and spreading the word about the campaign.

We are truly thankful for this support and look forward to continuing strong. Keep an eye out for updates and for news about people in our community who support our campaign!

This #GivingTuesday, make your donation to the Tor Project, and tell the world that you #SupportTor!

Thank you for helping Tor stay strong and independent!

The first thing that Laura Poitras has to say about Tor is that she couldn’t have made Citizenfour without it.

“There’s no way I would have been able to protect the initial source without using Tor,” she says. “Fundamentally, without Tor and other free software tools I wouldn’t have been able to do the reporting, and the story would not have been broken.”

Laura also recalls her own learning process around encryption that allowed her to communicate easily with Snowden when he first contacted her. “I’ve been on a government watch list since 2006,” she says. “In 2010, I was interested in reaching out to Jake Appelbaum around the work he was doing with Tor. I got up to speed on encryption just to contact him, and he taught me far more. Then Snowden came along and taught me even more. So I’ve had good teachers.”

She references her first exchange with Snowden that dramatically shifted her methods of communication.

“He contacted me through Micah Lee initially,” she recalls. “And of course Micah sent the encrypted email to me. The problem was that my key was still attached to my actual identity at the time and Ed quickly encouraged me to change that. By my third email from him, I was communicating on Tails with a computer that I bought with cash, checking it only from public places. I was using the Tor Browser for all of my research, and to verify the information I was hearing. It was essential in moving the whole story forward.”

Laura is heartened by feedback she has received that Citizenfour, by so compellingly telling Snowden’s story, has helped make mass surveillance a topic for public debate.

“Before Snowden, as a journalist, I knew that I had to be careful, but didn’t quite know how to protect myself,” she remembers. “I knew I needed anonymity, but didn’t know what tools to use.”

And she encourages everyone to use, and to support Tor.

“There are so many reasons…that we want to protect our privacy and not broadcast every move we make online. Tor is an essential tool that is needed by people to do what they do. It fosters free speech and independent voices.”

Donate to Tor Today!