- Both Russia and China have blocked access to certain social media sites in an attempt to keep their citizens from having access to news and information sources outside of state control.
- Russia in particular has instituted draconian censorship of news sources and surveillance of its own citizens since the invasion of Ukraine.
- Accessing .onion sites using the Tor Browser is a way of bypassing state censorship and surveillance.
The Tor Browser
If you ask the average person about the Tor Browser, it tends to conjure images of criminals in hoodies purveying and accessing illegal services on the Dark Web (i.e. the Silk Road). But what actually is Tor, and does it have legitimate uses?
Tor, or The Onion Router, was created by researchers at the Naval Research Lab (NRL) in 1995 as a means of preventing monitoring of private communications on the web. Later work by MIT researchers and the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) led to the creation of a nonprofit called The Tor Project.
When a person uses the Tor Browser, traffic is routed through input, intermediate, and output nodes located in different geographic locations. This effectively masks the IP address and identity of the user. Traffic between nodes is encrypted. Tor users generally access sites using .onion addresses. For extra security, the user should encrypt sensitive data because it is not encrypted by default after leaving the exit node.
Tor as a tool to avoid censorship
Because of the design of the Tor network, it is a good tool for avoiding state censorship. Because data can be end-to-end encrypted and IP addresses masked, a careful user can effectively bypass censorship. There are pitfalls that need to be avoided, though. Because an internet service provider (ISP), and most likely state intelligence agencies, can determine that someone is using Tor, (even if they can’t tell what they are doing), The TOR Project recommends that users needing to bypass state censorship use a bridge to obfuscate the connection to the Tor network . Also, I personally recommend not changing Tor default settings unless you really know what you are doing. See https://torproject.org/ for more information and recommendations.
Twitter and Facebook offer .onion sites
Traditionally, a lot of websites have blocked access via the Tor network. In light of the recent actions of the Russian government to block access to news sources and control the media, Twitter and Facebook (as well as the BBC and other news and information sites) now offer .onion sites, allowing people trapped behind these media blackouts access to information from the outside world. I recommend, though, that users do a little research to be sure their activities are truly obfuscated (and that they remain that way). The following are some recommendations to consider:
- Don’t change the default setting of the Tor browser under most circumstances.
- Access the Tor network using either a virtual machine (like Whonix) or using a live operating system that does not save any history after shutdown. Tails is probably the best choice, Kodachi Linux would be another. They can be booted from a USB stick or CD.
- If you have to download and/or print files, you should save them to a USB drive and do it from a different computer not linked to the internet.
- Consider using VPN over Tor, as long as you use a VPN that doesn’t keep logs and ideally one that allows anonymous payment via Bitcoin (Remember that just using Bitcoin does NOT make you anonymous, but how to make anonymous payments with Bitcoin is beyond the scope of this article).
Cybersecurity Journey 