Accidental Technologist: The Tor Browser and Intellectual Freedom in the Digital Age

I have wanted to publish a column on privacy as it relates to library technology for a while. While privacy has always been an issue at the forefront of librarians' minds, revelations surrounding the NSA's far-reaching data-collection programs and a seemingly unending string of high-profile breaches at major companies make paying attention to privacy all the more pressing. Having discovered Alison Macrina's work via an appropriately-titled article "Radical Librarianship: How Ninja Librarians are Ensuring Patrons' Electronic Privacy," she was an obvious choice for author. Her work with the Library Freedom Project is vitally important to the future of libraries and recently earned a Knight Foundation grant.--Editor If you've been following the revelations of the last year and half detailing the overbroad and often illegal collection of data by the NSA surveillance machine and its various government and corporate partners, you've no doubt heard of Tor. It's a powerful tool for anonymity, one of many tools that whistleblowers like Edward Snowden, activists, journalists, and everyday people use to help conceal their identities online. The Tor web browser was featured in some of NSA slides that Snowden leaked (see figure 1); according to the spies, it's a tool for terrorists and other criminals, which ignores the many legitimate reasons noncriminals might want to conceal their sensitive personal data from spies and hackers. Other Tor-haters insist, without evidence, that the browser is actually an NSA false flag, designed to trick users into thinking that it's protecting their online activity, but in fact designed to compromise privacy, or that it's been broken by cryptographers working for the government--or that it never even worked at all. Many false, sometimes deliberately misleading, things are written about Tor, and the people smearing it seem to want Tor banned or shut down outright (for a thorough explication and evisceration of some of the major condemnations of Tor, read this perfectly-worded blog post from The Intercept's Micah Lee). (1) What is it about Tor that causes such controversy? Tor is a powerful tool that gives users anonymity in an age of total online surveillance. It's misunderstood and therefore sensationalized by a nontechnical media and public. But it's also something that librarians need not only to understand, but to champion and fight for. Why? In this era of dragnet surveillance, our freedom to read and write freely is threatened. A recent PEN study entitled "Chilling Effects: NSA Surveillance Drives U.S. Writers to Self-Censor" detailed this well, showing that one in six writers polled had self-censored because of fears of surveillance, and another one in six had seriously considered doing so. (2) This is an Figure 1. "Terrorist with Tor client installed" from one of the NSA slides revealed by Edward Snowden to Glenn Greenwald in June 2013. alarming statistic, one that shows how much surveillance threatens free expression. There are few things librarians care more about than intellectual freedom, and Tor can help our local communities protect that freedom. This is why libraries should be installing the Tor Browser on all public PCs, running Tor relays from our networks, and teaching the public what Tor is and how they can use it to protect themselves. [FIGURE 1 OMITTED] To help our library community understand this tool, a little background on Tor and how it works is necessary. First, just what is Tor? The most simple definition comes directly from the folks at the Tor Project: "Tor is a network of virtual tunnels that allows people and groups to improve their privacy and security on the Internet." (3) The most common use of Tor is through its web browser, which you'll see referred to as "the Tor Browser," "the Tor Browser Bundle," or sometimes simply "Tor." Tor is fundamentally a proxy that masks the location information and browsing history of the user, allowing for anonymous use of the Internet. …