A US judge has put into the public record, during a hearing in Tacoma, Washington, an interesting
pair of comments about Tor.
Tor, of course, is the so-called
onion router network, originally designed by the US Navy as a technique for using the public internet in an anonymous way.
End-to-end encryption, such as you get when you point your browser at an HTTPS site like Naked Security, is good for confidentiality: eavesdroppers can’t keep track of which pages you’re most interested in, or sneakily sniff out your email address when you publish a comment.
HTTPS is also important for authenticity, so that when you visit Naked Security, you know that you really are reading our site, rather than content provided by a bunch of imposters.
But anonymity depends on more than that: you might not want an eavesdropper to know that you visited Naked Security at all.
That sort of anonymity isn’t just for activists, journalists and crooks. You aren’t under any obligation to broadcast your choice of bank to the world, for example, or to give away your favourite TV channel, or to reveal which takeaway pizza business you’re favouring this month. That sort of information may well be pretty harmless, one data point at a time, but to a crook who wants to impersonate you, or to convince your friends he knows you, or to learn more about you to stalk you, it all adds up.
