Jeopardy For $1000: A Pungent Vegetable That Hides Your Surfing From The NSA - Granite Grok

Jeopardy For $1000: A Pungent Vegetable That Hides Your Surfing From The NSA

“A tangled web, Alex: What is TOR, The Onion Router?”

The TOR Project 

Watch the video or click the onion to learn how it can help you – read on to learn how I met TOR…

So, you tie me to a chair, shine a bright light in my eyes, and ask: “Who is this TOR person, where did you meet him, and what is his objective?” Welll, it all started like this…

Once upon a time, far, far away, at an Ivy League University, in a socialist suburb just across the river from a major east coast port city, I had the privilege of managing the network for a period of time. It was there that awareness of TOR was thrust upon me by the sudden arrival of federal orders to cease, desist, and hand over my records. Huh? What?

You see, kids at university get up to all kinds of mischief – whether it’s simple music piracy, or publishing the wrong kinds of “art”, or actual hacking, there are laws against some of their activities, and when those activities are conducted from the university’s network, the network staff have to track down the miscreants.

TOR is an order of magnitude more interesting than music and videos, and the Computer Science department was an active participant – they didn’t just run one TOR node, they ran THREE, and they ran them as “exit nodes”, where the anonymized traffic gets put back on the internet…… from a lab using the university’s well known address space.

Well, TOR may have been designed to allow dissidents, spies, and nervous citizens like you to surf and communicate without fear, but just like a ski mask can be used for crime, so can an anonymizer be used by criminals, pornographers, and others with ill intentions – in this case, under age pictures (ewww). As you’d expect for a well designed, onion-like, system, there was precious little to find, but they had to ask, and we had to freeze the node until they’d looked.

I had several run-ins with the CompSci department over TOR – Their argument was that it was all in the interests of ‘science’ to learn how TOR was used (it was impossible to know who used it), and my argument was that they could at least treat the university’s name with respect and rent separate internet connections that were not in its well known address range! Sheesh! Nerds!

This sketch from the video gives you an idea of how it works – by randomizing both where you connect to, and where you appear to connect from, and by using an anonymized version of Firefox, TOR makes it much harder to trace your web traffic:
TOR-Example
So, indeed, a tangled web we weave, when we practice to deceive tyrannical government. Click the onion above for more info. Just the cure for the Rappin’ Remy NSA Blues

Video and diagram: Reason.TV
More detailed description of TOR.

>