Название: Tor: From the Dark Web to the Future of Privacy
Автор: Ben Collier
Издательство: The MIT Press
Год: 2024
Страниц: 243
Язык: английский
Формат: pdf (true), epub (true)
Размер: 10.1 MB

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 book: where this complex and contested infrastructure came from, why it exists, and how it connects with global power in intricate and intimate ways. In Tor: 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—still known to most as the Dark Web or Dark Net—is not an easy subject to research. It exists on a bizarre terrain, simultaneously in the living rooms of lovely nerds, in the nightmares of police officers, in the small spaces of everyday digital life, and in the corridors of global power. It is a thin and brittle network stretched across the globe like a glass spiderweb and at the same time a profound challenge to the most powerful spy agencies in the world.

Even the basic facts of Tor can seem confusing. Explained simply, Tor is an infrastructure built on top of the internet that gives people very strong security and privacy protections online. It uses a clever technical design to work around some of the most basic protocols and technologies that allow the internet to get your web traffic from one place to another. Regular internet traffic needs the digital equivalent of the to and from address on a letter in order to navigate to its destination, and these can be recorded by parts of the infrastructure your traffic passes through as it travels around the world. This has created a range of points at which the people who own and run the infrastructure in different countries have installed powerful tools for surveilling the people who use it.

Tor has a technological design that tries to solve this problem—to allow you to use the internet infrastructure without the infrastructure itself seeing what you’re up to. This is no mean feat—the equivalent of getting a letter successfully to its destination with the to and from addresses being completely invisible to the post office. By doing this, Tor protects its users (although not absolutely) from the most powerful actors watching the internet today, including nation-states, police, spy agencies, and the massive private companies that run it.

Most users access Tor in the form of a rather innocuous web browser—much like Chrome, Safari, or Firefox—that rapidly clicks and whirrs through a pleasing set of additional messages before it starts up, giving it a slightly hacker-film feel. Once this is finished and the connection to the Tor network is confirmed, the user can simply browse the internet as normal.

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