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Tor: From the Dark Web to the Future of Privacy
A biography of Tor—a cultural and technological history of power, privacy, and global politics at the internet's core.
Tor, one of the most important and misunderstood technologies of the digital age, is best known as the infrastructure underpinning the so-called Dark Web. But the real “dark web,” when it comes to Tor, is the hidden history brought to light in this where this complex and contested infrastructure came from, why it exists, and how it connects with global power in intricate and intimate ways. In From the Dark Web to the Future of Privacy , Ben Collier has written, in essence, a biography of Tor—a cultural and technological history of power, privacy, politics, and empire in the deepest reaches of the internet.
The story of Tor begins in the 1990s with its creation by the US Navy’s Naval Research Lab, from a convergence of different cultural worlds. Drawing on in-depth interviews with designers, developers, activists, and users, along with twenty years of mailing lists, design documents, reporting, and legal papers, Collier traces Tor’s evolution from those early days to its current operation on the frontlines of global digital power—including the strange collaboration between US military scientists and a group of freewheeling hackers called the Cypherpunks. As Collier charts the rise and fall of three different cultures in Tor’s diverse community—the engineers, the maintainers, and the activists, each with a distinct understanding of and vision for Tor—he reckons with Tor’s complicated, changing relationship with contemporary US empire. Ultimately, the book reveals how different groups of users have repurposed Tor and built new technologies and worlds of their own around it, with profound implications for the future of the Internet.
Tor, one of the most important and misunderstood technologies of the digital age, is best known as the infrastructure underpinning the so-called Dark Web. But the real “dark web,” when it comes to Tor, is the hidden history brought to light in this where this complex and contested infrastructure came from, why it exists, and how it connects with global power in intricate and intimate ways. In From the Dark Web to the Future of Privacy , Ben Collier has written, in essence, a biography of Tor—a cultural and technological history of power, privacy, politics, and empire in the deepest reaches of the internet.
The story of Tor begins in the 1990s with its creation by the US Navy’s Naval Research Lab, from a convergence of different cultural worlds. Drawing on in-depth interviews with designers, developers, activists, and users, along with twenty years of mailing lists, design documents, reporting, and legal papers, Collier traces Tor’s evolution from those early days to its current operation on the frontlines of global digital power—including the strange collaboration between US military scientists and a group of freewheeling hackers called the Cypherpunks. As Collier charts the rise and fall of three different cultures in Tor’s diverse community—the engineers, the maintainers, and the activists, each with a distinct understanding of and vision for Tor—he reckons with Tor’s complicated, changing relationship with contemporary US empire. Ultimately, the book reveals how different groups of users have repurposed Tor and built new technologies and worlds of their own around it, with profound implications for the future of the Internet.
242 pages, Paperback
Published April 16, 2024
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
October 24, 2024
Loved this book. I was first introduced to Tor in highschool and ran an onion service (back then -- nineteen dickety two -- it was called a hidden service) for a small IRC network for my friends and I. I especially appreciated the history from about 2013 to post-2019 as I stopped following the Tor project then.
I specifically appreciated the author detailing a specific attack that was dismissed by the development team as unrealistic -- the global passive adversary -- when it was originally being designed. This was exposed by the Snowden leaks.
Tor's design decisions needed to be updated in the post-Snowden world, taking in to account a "global passive adversary."
The author really seems to understand the history of the Tor project from its start to its current state. Throughout the book there are citations and block quotes from maintainers and developers. I love the way he breaks down the different groups that have an interest in keeping Tor alive. He talks about how despite their seemingly conflicting reasons for building and supporting the project they continue to do so. The last chapter on the future of the Tor project is insightful:
Pretty great read especially because (unsurprisingly) the Tor network is still relevant. Brian Krebs reported just yesterday that advertising agencies are selling our cellphone location data to data brokers who in turn sell it to whomever pays enough.
I specifically appreciated the author detailing a specific attack that was dismissed by the development team as unrealistic -- the global passive adversary -- when it was originally being designed. This was exposed by the Snowden leaks.
>In a since-deleted comment on this story, a university-based exit relay operator related their own experience of being subpoenaed by the Department of Homeland Security to produce three months of records for the IP address of their Tor exit node. This indicated to the Tor developers that these “netflow” logs commonly collected by internet service providers were being actively sought by law enforcement in the US . . .
> Netflow logs are administrative records collected by internet service providers from routers. They provide timestamps for activity, indicating when a router is inactive and when it is sending information. This can be particularly damaging for Tor, as information on the timings of signals sent to and from Tor routers is exactly what is needed to perform the correlation attacks imagined in the padding discussion. In terms of our Cold War metaphor, this would be like a spy agency who has paid our agent’s neighbor to monitor when they leave their flat—timing when they enter the Tor network.. . .
> The developers, by mapping this information, realized that they could reduce the resolution of this timing information substantially at a very low cost by introducing a small amount of netflow padding traffic into the network. This meant that the internet service providers, instead of getting timings down to the second, would get them in much larger blocks, which were useless for timing attacks. In our metaphor from previous chapters, netflow padding makes the difference between an attentive neighbor who records exactly when our agent leaves their flat to meet their source—at 2:32pm—and one who can only see that they left sometime in the afternoon.
Tor's design decisions needed to be updated in the post-Snowden world, taking in to account a "global passive adversary."
The author really seems to understand the history of the Tor project from its start to its current state. Throughout the book there are citations and block quotes from maintainers and developers. I love the way he breaks down the different groups that have an interest in keeping Tor alive. He talks about how despite their seemingly conflicting reasons for building and supporting the project they continue to do so. The last chapter on the future of the Tor project is insightful:
> Tor’s three main cultural worlds—the engineers, the maintainers, and the activists—remain rooted in the long-standing traditions and ideas that have shaped the internet. . . .
> in the engineer’s perspective—is for Tor to dissolve into the bloodstream of the internet like a drug, flowing with the other protocols and standards that underpin our digital lives. [The author speaks of it being included in Private browsing mode in Brave and struggles to get it included in Firefox, standardization to be included in core protocols that route traffic on the internet, and finally 'beefing up its threat model to include the kinds of global attacks'] . . .
> For the maintainers, though increasingly united in a more communal, professionalized culture, the focus remains on the pragmatics of the infrastructure and keeping things running. [The author speaks of a web3 integrating cryptocurrencies/NFTs/the block chain at large into the design of Tor due to some "killer app" that runs on the network in the near future.] ... If Tor were incorporated into the backbone of the NFT market (or indeed, any other major digital infrastructure), it would pose immediate practical challenges for the Tor network. The additional load and congestion would increase the material and cultural power of the relay operators, as they would become key to scaling up to deal with the new challenges of scale. If it became the foundation of higher-level mass-use infrastructure, Tor’s more neutral or neutralized maintainer perspective could be revived; the wide variety of use cases, political diversity, and pragmatic challenges would make overt alignment with political causes far more difficult. . .
> An alternative future would see Tor take the opposite approach—engaging even more prominently in political battles and embodying the ideas and practices of Tor’s relatively newly ascendant activist world. In this vision, Tor would become further connected with social movements and human rights struggles—either internally, through statements of values and organizational practice, or externally, through directly joining coalitions with activist groups and putting Tor’s technologies front and center in aligning online privacy with other social justice campaigns.
Pretty great read especially because (unsurprisingly) the Tor network is still relevant. Brian Krebs reported just yesterday that advertising agencies are selling our cellphone location data to data brokers who in turn sell it to whomever pays enough.
August 24, 2025
A fascinating book about Tor (The Onion Routing), starting with its origins in the American military establishment, to its current day usage as a means to anonymously connect to sites over the internet or to covertly 'leak' information. The book doesn't talk much about the technology used in Tor, but concentrates on the organisations and people who developed Tor, manage it and use it. They are the ones who will determine the future of Tor.
The book starts by looking at the Internet and the question of how to anonymously transfer data. In theory, anybody could monitor links at one or more internet service providers and determine who is sending data to whom. This was of concern to the US military, who wanted a way for overseas personnel to send data without other parties being aware of it. There were several solutions proposed, but the one they choose was 'Onion Routing'. In Onion Routing, encrypted data was sent to an entry relay, which passes the data to another relay, which then sends the data to an exit relay and onwards to the destination. Each relay only knows how to pass on the data to the next relay.
If just one person was using Onion Routing, the route would be obvious. But the military envisioned Onion Routing being used by the public. Military traffic would then be mixed in with this traffic, making it much harder to determine which packets of data are being sent by whom. Entities monitoring only the entry or exit points would only know who is using it, but not why. Of course, a 'global entity' could monitor everything, but this can not considered possible at the time (the mid 1990s). This would, of course, change in later years.
Since the military needed the public to use Onion Routing, they had to recruit technologists to 'sell the technology' to their groups. This group of people would be the security hackers and 'technology libertarians / anarchists' of that period, who saw how internet technology was being monitored (or subverted) by the government, and had an idealised vision of the technology being 'free' from government intervention or censorship. From this strange grouping of people (those who want to control the internet and those who want it to be 'free'), Tor was born.
As Tor usage grew, usability would become an issue. The creation of the Tor Browser would provide users with a 'one click' solution to use Tor, helping it to grow in popularity. This would lead to 'The Dark Web', a set of hidden (Tor) services for illegal activities like pornography or drugs. While headlines at the time might lead people to believe most of the Dark Web is Tor based, in reality such transactions are mostly done (protected by encryption) using the standard internet. What Tor did allow was anonymous transactions to be created, leading to a growth in the use of cryptocurrencies for anomymous payment, and for the dumping of information on sites like WikiLeaks.
Later on, another group of people would start to use Tor: the activist, agitating for action and using Tor as a way to hide their activities from organisations that want to stop them. Leaks at the time would also show some governments were trying to achive a 'global view' of the internet by gathering vast amounts of data from numerous providers, causing a change in Tor to counteract such measures.
Which brings us to the present. While Tor is used and does its job, it is still not very widely used, and associated with the Dark Web in the eyes of the public. Tor was initially funded by the military, but now looks to funding from various non-governmental groups and organised in a way to ensure no one person can exert undue influence on it.
In closing, the book argues that Tor is still looking for a 'killer app' that would bring about wider usage of Tor, and help the general public to secure privacy in their communications from governments that seem to want to accumulate more ways to observe when people are doing on the internet.
The book starts by looking at the Internet and the question of how to anonymously transfer data. In theory, anybody could monitor links at one or more internet service providers and determine who is sending data to whom. This was of concern to the US military, who wanted a way for overseas personnel to send data without other parties being aware of it. There were several solutions proposed, but the one they choose was 'Onion Routing'. In Onion Routing, encrypted data was sent to an entry relay, which passes the data to another relay, which then sends the data to an exit relay and onwards to the destination. Each relay only knows how to pass on the data to the next relay.
If just one person was using Onion Routing, the route would be obvious. But the military envisioned Onion Routing being used by the public. Military traffic would then be mixed in with this traffic, making it much harder to determine which packets of data are being sent by whom. Entities monitoring only the entry or exit points would only know who is using it, but not why. Of course, a 'global entity' could monitor everything, but this can not considered possible at the time (the mid 1990s). This would, of course, change in later years.
Since the military needed the public to use Onion Routing, they had to recruit technologists to 'sell the technology' to their groups. This group of people would be the security hackers and 'technology libertarians / anarchists' of that period, who saw how internet technology was being monitored (or subverted) by the government, and had an idealised vision of the technology being 'free' from government intervention or censorship. From this strange grouping of people (those who want to control the internet and those who want it to be 'free'), Tor was born.
As Tor usage grew, usability would become an issue. The creation of the Tor Browser would provide users with a 'one click' solution to use Tor, helping it to grow in popularity. This would lead to 'The Dark Web', a set of hidden (Tor) services for illegal activities like pornography or drugs. While headlines at the time might lead people to believe most of the Dark Web is Tor based, in reality such transactions are mostly done (protected by encryption) using the standard internet. What Tor did allow was anonymous transactions to be created, leading to a growth in the use of cryptocurrencies for anomymous payment, and for the dumping of information on sites like WikiLeaks.
Later on, another group of people would start to use Tor: the activist, agitating for action and using Tor as a way to hide their activities from organisations that want to stop them. Leaks at the time would also show some governments were trying to achive a 'global view' of the internet by gathering vast amounts of data from numerous providers, causing a change in Tor to counteract such measures.
Which brings us to the present. While Tor is used and does its job, it is still not very widely used, and associated with the Dark Web in the eyes of the public. Tor was initially funded by the military, but now looks to funding from various non-governmental groups and organised in a way to ensure no one person can exert undue influence on it.
In closing, the book argues that Tor is still looking for a 'killer app' that would bring about wider usage of Tor, and help the general public to secure privacy in their communications from governments that seem to want to accumulate more ways to observe when people are doing on the internet.
September 16, 2024
Well-written. I particularly enjoyed the soft-pedaled academic analysis: this book is more than a popular history of Tor. It is an extended academic paper which discusses the various groups of people involved in the history of Tor, and analyzes their purposes and goals. The author explains viewpoints and thought patterns which are likely subconscious to the people involved, but this explanation encourages the reader to a deeper understanding of the people behind the story. Collier keeps his analysis just light enough that it rides above the story, encouraging our deeper thought while not repelling us with ivory tower drivel.
May 27, 2024
Super detailed look into Tor and a lot of history.
August 12, 2024
Very good book. Key points:
- privacy is of a place, and information should carry the privacy norms of the place in which it was made from place to place
- the Navy researchers who made Tor are (1) more like typical academics than we expect, and (2) were very capable of negotiating with their ostensible domestic enemies to get what they wanted
- the Tor Project did not, in fact, realize that the Dark Web would metastasize into what it became. This really only became apparent with Chelsea Manning & Wikileaks, Bitcoin, and Ross Ulbricht's Silk Road
- as a result, circa 2013 when various LE agencies wanted to develop "bulk traffic intercepts" (UK's GCHQ foremost), Tor becames a scapegoat for allowing pedophiles
- Tor was kind of dying until Snowden kicked off a new wave of grassroots anti-authoritiarian activists, who wanted to maintain Tor to maintain internet freedom worldwide
- this increased "value-orientation" happened in conjunction with major internet outlets (BBC, Facebook, Twitter) starting to host their own onion sites
- Tor still is in active maintenance, and hasn't achieved wide adoption yet.
- they tried really hard to get it integrated in to Firefox, but this failed
- apparently Tor is being rewritten in Rust now
- 500k individuals connected to Tor during the Iranian 2022 summer protests
- you can view Tor as an outgrowth of American imperialism, & even libertarian encroachment on the world (can you force libertarianism on other people?)
- Tor will continue, hopefully
- privacy is of a place, and information should carry the privacy norms of the place in which it was made from place to place
- the Navy researchers who made Tor are (1) more like typical academics than we expect, and (2) were very capable of negotiating with their ostensible domestic enemies to get what they wanted
- the Tor Project did not, in fact, realize that the Dark Web would metastasize into what it became. This really only became apparent with Chelsea Manning & Wikileaks, Bitcoin, and Ross Ulbricht's Silk Road
- as a result, circa 2013 when various LE agencies wanted to develop "bulk traffic intercepts" (UK's GCHQ foremost), Tor becames a scapegoat for allowing pedophiles
- Tor was kind of dying until Snowden kicked off a new wave of grassroots anti-authoritiarian activists, who wanted to maintain Tor to maintain internet freedom worldwide
- this increased "value-orientation" happened in conjunction with major internet outlets (BBC, Facebook, Twitter) starting to host their own onion sites
1. We advance human rights by creating and deploying usable anonymity and privacy technologies.
2. Open and transparent research and tools are key to our success.
3. Our tools are free to access, use, adapt, and distribute.
4. We make Tor and related technologies ubiquitous through advocacy and education.
5. We are honest about the capabilities and limits of Tor and related technologies.
6. We will never intentionally harm our users.
Tor Social Contract (condensed), August 2016
- Tor still is in active maintenance, and hasn't achieved wide adoption yet.
- they tried really hard to get it integrated in to Firefox, but this failed
- apparently Tor is being rewritten in Rust now
- 500k individuals connected to Tor during the Iranian 2022 summer protests
- you can view Tor as an outgrowth of American imperialism, & even libertarian encroachment on the world (can you force libertarianism on other people?)
- Tor will continue, hopefully
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews