If you didn’t know, the US & many other Governments like to filter the Internet, exposing your online surfing habits to their scrutinization. If you have not heard about the Tor Project, you really should download their plug-in for Firefox and start protecting your privacy.

Tor: anonymity online

Tor is free software and an open network that helps you defend against a form of network surveillance that threatens personal freedom and privacy, confidential business activities and relationships, and state security known as traffic analysis.

Tor protects you by bouncing your communications around a distributed network of relays run by volunteers all around the world: it prevents somebody watching your Internet connection from learning what sites you visit, and it prevents the sites you visit from learning your physical location. Tor works with many of your existing applications, including web browsers, instant messaging clients, remote login, and other applications based on the TCP protocol.

Hundreds of thousands of people around the world use Tor for a wide variety of reasons: journalists and bloggers, human rights workers, law enforcement officers, soldiers, corporations, citizens of repressive regimes, and just ordinary citizens. See the Who Uses Tor? page for examples of typical Tor users. See the overview page for a more detailed explanation of what Tor does, and why this diversity of users is important.

Tor doesn’t magically encrypt all of your Internet activities, though. You should understand what Tor does and does not do for you.

What Tor does is allow you to keep websites from tracking you, as well as allowing you to publish web content without allowing you to reveal the location of the site, such as sensitive chat rooms or forums for rape & abuse survivors, or ill persons.

Tor helps reduce the risk of Internet surveillance called Traffic Analysis, which knows the source & destination of all things on the net. Like when you make an online purchase or send an email. There is a start point & destination point.

It reveals who & where you are. If you are whistle blower pointing out huge Government waste, your security could be compromised. So Tor uses many computers to pass the data along a hard to trace route; kind of like when you take a route to try to throw someone off, and you go different ways than expected. That is what Tor does.

So it passes along the net over rendezvous points, which will not be traceable. By not revealing your weblocation, you can surf the Internet free of anyone watching or recording your movements. As Big Brother becomes Gargantuant Brother, you need all the privacy you can get.

So start by downloading the FREE Tor software and browse in freedom.To learn more about the Tor Project, click here.

Protecting your privacy…

Christopher Winkler
Spy & Surveillance Gear Expert
EyeSpyPro.com