Tor currently has about two million daily users worldwide, most of them originating from the United States, Germany, and Russia. Similarly, Tor is important for law enforcement as it allows for covert operations and investigations online. Secure communication is essential in whistleblowing cases, like the Edward Snowden revelations. Journalists and their sources rely on it to communicate securely and anonymously, without fear of government interference.

Tor is short for “ The Onion Router.” It is often viewed negatively by the press and law enforcement agencies, but it has many positive benefits. In this guide, we will explain the origins of Tor, how the network works, how you can make use of it and contribute to it, and the many other little things Tor enables us to do online. In internal documents, the NSA has even referred to Tor as “the king of high-secure, low-latency internet anonymity.” The Tor Browser can significantly increase a user’s privacy and anonymity online. Tor (originally called The Onion Router because it layers your traffic like an onion) is a free network of servers, or “nodes,” that randomly route internet traffic between each other in order to obfuscate the origin of the data.

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