Last week, we celebrated Data Privacy day. Everything we do online—whether on a computer or on a mobile device—is being tracked, traced, compiled, crunched, bought and sold by familiar tech-titans like Google, Facebook, Verizon and hundreds of lesser known data brokers who help advertisers build frighteningly detailed digital profiles of users by harvesting data from a variety of sources, including customer databases and online platforms. After I lecture to my students on this topic, rattling off a dozen mechanisms by which corporations and governments can spy and pry on us, threating both anonymity and privacy, their reaction is usually either indifference (because, you know, they think they have nothing to hide) or for those that I’ve convinced they should care, some measure of despair.

This summer, DoJ Cybercrime Lab director Ovie Carroll presented at a Federal Judicial Seminar in San Diego, attended by over 100 US federal judges, where he recommended that the judges should use Tor — The Onion Router, subject of much handwringing and serious technological assaults from the US government, but which is also primarily funded by the USG — to protect their personal information while using their home and work computers.

Everyone thinks libraries have a positive role to play in the world, but that role differs greatly based on whether you’re talking to a librarian or a patron. Ask a patron what libraries have in common and they’d probably answer: they share books with people. Librarians give a different answer: they share a set of values. It’s time for libraries to step up to those values by supporting access to the Internet and taking the lead in fighting to keep the Internet open, free, and unowned.

We've run a Tor exit-node for years. In June, we got the nightmare Tor operator scenario: a federal subpoena (don't worry, it ended surprisingly well!)

So, an EFF activist gig isn't for you and neither is deputy director of the Free Software Foundation: how about executive director of the Tor Project, which maintains The Onion Router, a crucial piece of anonymity and privacy technology?

After the spectacular rise and fall of Anonabox, a kickstarted $45 router that was supposed to protect your privacy but had its campaign yanked for not being entirely forthright with backers, a spate of shady, silly, and even serious projects have sprung up to fill the demand that Anonabox's $615,000 Kickstarter near-win demonstrated.

Andrew Lewman, head of operations for The Onion Router (TOR), an anonymity and privacy tool that is particularly loathed by the spy agencies' capos, credits Tor's anonymous bug-reporting system for giving spies a safe way to report bugs in Tor that would otherwise be weaponized to attack Tor's users.

The NSA says it only banks the communications of "targeted" individuals. Guess what? If you follow a search-engine link to Boing Boing's articles about Tor and Tails, you've been targeted. Cory Doctorow digs into Xkeyscore and the NSA's deep packet inspection rules.

Tor (The Onion Router) is a military-grade, secure tool for increasing the privacy and anonymity of your communications; but it's been the subject of plenty of fear, uncertainty and doubt.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation's 7 Things You Should Know About Tor debunks some of the most common myths about the service (which even the NSA can't break) and raises some important points about Tor's limitations. — Read the rest

In my latest Guardian column, 'Cybersecurity' begins with integrity, not surveillance, I try to make sense of the argument against surveillance. Is mass surveillance bad because it doesn't catch "bad guys" or because it is immoral? There's a parallel to torture — even if you can find places where torture would work to get you some useful information, it would still be immoral. — Read the rest

Top-secret documents leaked to the Guardian by former US intelligence contractor Edward Snowden reveal details of repeated attempts by the US and UK governments to crack Tor, the "onion router" that was originally funded in by the US government, and used widely by dissidents and activists around the world. — Read the rest

A new rev of the Great Firewall of China seeks out VPN connections (including, I assume, connections over The Onion Router) and terminates them. Only companies who register official VPNs with the Chinese government will be able to run them without interference. — Read the rest

Runa from The Onion Router — a privacy and anti-censorship tool used around the world — writes, "We are looking for another dedicated core developer to join our team. Your job would be to work on all aspects of the main Tor network daemon and other open-source software. — Read the rest

My latest Publishers Weekly column is "Copyrights vs. Human Rights." In honor of Human Rights Day on Dec 10, I've written a piece on publishing's shameful support of SOPA, a law that will punish the online services that are so key to coordinating and publicizing human rights struggles around the world. — Read the rest

On September 13th, the Iranian government began blocking The Onion Router (TOR), a system for evading network censorship. On September 14th, the TOR project changed its code so that it wasn't blocked anymore.

Yesterday morning (in our timezones — that evening, in Iran), Iran added a filter rule to their border routers that recognized Tor traffic and blocked it.

GuidoDavid sez, "Len Sassaman, a cryptographer, activist and biopunk died yesterday, he lost the battle against depression in Leuven, Belgium. He is survived by his widow, Meredith L. Patterson, also a hacker and biopunk. His work and actions inspired me and shaped the world we live in, as he was active during the Crypto Wars and
designed and wrote anonymizing tools. — Read the rest

The Electronic Frontier Foundation and The Onion Router (TOR) project have teamed up to release a new privacy-enhancing Firefox plugin called HTTPS Everywhere. It was inspired by Google's new encrypted search engine, and it ensures that whenever you visit a site that accepts encrypted connections, your browser switches into encrypted mode, hiding your traffic from snoops on your local network and at your ISP. — Read the rest

TOR (The Onion Router, a technology for bouncing your traffic all over the net so that your ISP can't spy on you) is now available for Android phones. Just take a picture of the QR code on the right with your Barcode Scanner or Goggles app to install it. — Read the rest

The Electronic Frontier Foundation is looking for student programmers to do paid work on various liberty-enhancing technologies this summer, paid for by Google, through its excellent Summer of Code project. This summer, there's funding for programmers to work on TOR (The Onion Router — a system for evading censorwalls and enhancing online privacy by bouncing your traffic through several volunteers' computers), TOSBack (tracking changes to the terms of service of the Internet's most popular websites), OurVoteLive (tracking problems in elections with US polling places and voting machines) and Switzerland (a passive IP-layer network neutrality testing system). — Read the rest

Here's a nice little introductory article on TOR, The Onion Router, a privacy-enhancing technology that helps you to circumvent national, corporate and school firewalls and enhance your anonymity. Originally developed by the US military to help communications get in and out of countries that heavily filter their networks, TOR is free/open software and is maintained by many volunteers around the world, including the Electronic Frontier Foundation. — Read the rest