If you’ve been on the internet for long enough, chances are you might’ve heard of Tor, or The Onion Router, which has been becoming widely talked about within the past few years due to its connection to the Deep Web and Dark Web. Now, for those who don’t know much about Tor, they would usually assume that only hardened criminals and questionable computer enthusiasts would use Tor but I’m here to explain what Tor actually is and its connections to my school work recently…

So what’s with my sudden interest in an anonymous version of the internet? My activity on the internet doesn’t really count as the kind of “shady” activity you might expect on an anonymous web browser. So what gives? Well, over winter break, we were told to read a book called Little Brother. I’m not going to give too much away from the book as it’s actually not a bad read and I would definitely recommend reading it. The book deals a lot with freedom, security, privacy, speech, and rebellion amongst many other things. It’s also worth mentioning that this book talks A LOT about technology which is where my connection with Tor comes in…

Throughout Little Brother, we are introduced to lots, and I mean LOTS, of different computer terms and technical terms, different devices, services, groups, and history about technology. Needless to say when I finished the book, I definitely reached Bill Gates levels of tech-knowledge. Not really but you know what I mean.

Either way, we came back from winter vacation with our books completed and our brains filled to the brim. As much as they could be over vacation anyways.
A few days after being back to school, we were introduced to a new assignment, THIS post which you are reading. We were shown a great big list of topics that were mentioned in Little Brother and were assigned topics in raffle-fashion.

I was lucky enough to get my top choice, The Onion Router. Now that we knew our topics, we were given a few days to research our topic and connect it to our book, how it connects to the world, and our main question for this unit which is “How has technology acted as a disruption with its creation throughout history?”

Starting off with the real world, Tor is one of the most widely used anonymous browsers on the internet. Proudly displaying their motto, “Powering Digital Resistance!” Tor describes itself as an online service that defends users against network surveillance and traffic analysis. The way that Tor helps its users keep their anonymity is through the application of “layers.” Essentially, Tor directs its traffic through a free, worldwide, volunteer network of over 7000 relays. The traffic takes random routes, going from Onion Router to Onion Router until it finds its destination, encrypting and deleting its steps as it goes.

This allows people to stay mostly anonymous, although I would take the word “mostly” with a grain of salt as Tor isn’t completely full-proof due to various methods of exploiting the browser. People may be quick to judge Tor and assume that the only people who use it are doing bad things but that’s not completely the case. You can say there is a bit of traffic for drugs and other shady things, sure, but there’s also millions of other users who are just trying to do everyday things. There are people like journalists who are trying to avoid trouble in the stories they find, and kids who are just trying to get around a blocked internet game. Another thing that people commonly try to get around is censorship.

This article talks about Tor and how people in Iran are using it to get around internet bans in the country, it’s pretty interesting so you should definitely check it out.

Moving on to how Tor connects with Little Brother, it’s actually only mentioned once and is talked about quite briefly in the first chapter. We get a very simple explanation of Tor and how it works and that’s it. Except that its not…
Throughout Little Brother, our main protagonist, Marcus, uses a thing called the Xnet which works exactly like The Onion Router except instead of using Tor, he uses Xbox Universals as a relay to use the internet anonymously.

I thought this was pretty interesting as I feel that the author, Cory Doctorow, purposely didn’t talk much about Tor so then he could introduce the Xnet and how it worked in his fictional world. I think that he also uses the Xnet to imply that similar disruptions made in the book could possibly happen in real life but that’s just my opinion.

Finally, how does Tor connect to the driving question of our unit; How has technology acted as a disruption with its creation throughout history? Since the introduction of Tor in 2002, a lot of disruption has occurred over the internet, although we don’t seem to hear about it too much. From whistleblowers sharing information with journalists, to large scale Bitcoin fraud, Tor has been subject to lots of disruption in the internet for the sixteen years that it’s been up and running. One of the most well-known features of Tor is that the Deepweb+Darkweb can be accessed. This is where the biggest disruptions come in.

The Darkweb can be accessed through private or hidden sites on Tor and hosts many illegal services, merchandise, and media. One of the biggest Darkweb markets out there is Silk Road.

Creator of Silk Road Website Files Appeal to the Supreme Court

Silk Road essentially worked as the eBay of all illegal things including drugs, weapons, and other not-so-fun things. Silk Road is currently on its third version as it has already been shut down twice and currently sees its creator, Ross Ulbricht facing a life sentence with no parol for the creation of the site and the thousands of laws it broke, involvement in murder, and money laundering to name a few things. Even without his presence, Silk Road was able to recover, still retaining its momentum from the first time it was shut down and as of now, doesn’t seem to show any signs of stopping. This is definitely a notable disruption in technology.

So where does that leave me? To be honest, people like me who’s extent of internet usage is funny videos, Snapchat, and homework shouldn’t really consider using Tor as we have nothing to hide and aren’t under countrywide censorship. In my case, I should be focusing on securing rather than anonymizing myself on the internet. Tor is for the ones that are trying to get around censorship, surveillance, and sometimes the law amongst other things.

Overall, I really liked learning about Tor and its many connections to the real world along with its connections to Little Brother. Although this was a small assignment, I definitely learned a lot more about the internet in general and things that go on without us knowing. I have a lot more work coming soon so be sure to stay tuned for that but for now, this is it. See ya later!