CHART: More Than 1.2 Million People Are Now Using The Web Browser That Lets You Evade NSA Snooping

[WillyT]

CHART OF THE DAY: More Than 1.2 Million People Are Now Using The Web Browser That Lets You Evade NSA Snooping
Dylan Love - BusinessInsider
8/30/13

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Tor, the anonymous network for browsing the Internet, has seen a huge resurgence in use ever since the news broke about the NSA's domestic spying program, PRISM.

The Tor network operates by rerouting your Web traffic around the world before delivering it to you. Doing this prevents your identity from ever being attached to your browsing history, so it's easy to see why it became a popular choice in browser after the PRISM news.

Here's a chart from the Tor Metrics Portal that shows an insane jump in daily users beginning in the middle of this month. The user base regularly flirts with the 600,000 mark before rocketing to over 1.2 million.



<snip>

Link: http://www.businessinsider.com/chart-tor-and-prism-2013-8

[delrem]

1. Thanks for the update, and important reminder!

recced

[Aerows]

2. Ehrm... I'm not really confident these days on Tor proxies

I'm not sure it is any safer than just flat out doing whatever, because they can easily be run by God only knows who.

[Shivering Jemmy]

3. Tor network thinks it's more anonymous than it is

http://www.defcon.org/images/defcon-16/dc16-presentations/defcon-16-evans-grothoff.pdf


Guarantee the NSA can do even better than this.

[indepat]

4. It's a rotten shame law-abiding citizens must go to such extremes to keep big brother

from encroaching on their 4th Amendment freedoms.

[Warpy]

5. They've at least partially cracked it

Just recently there were arrests made of kiddie porn producers and customers trying to cover their tracks through Tor.

http://gawker.com/dark-net-busted-wide-open-after-child-porn-arrest-1030239391

I dumped it after people in the short lived uprising in Iran started to switch to the short lived Haystack Project.

While it was amusing to see ads in Dutch and Korean, I knew about the kiddie porn people using it to hide behind.

I'm more concerned with corporate snooping and tracking, so I'm using Ghostery. It seems to work, a lot of the crap is disappearing.

[gopiscrap]

6. Good

[WillyT]

7. My Feeling... Exactly....