I recently mentioned Tor in my article highlighting The Silk Road, the online illegal substances marketplace that you must run Tor to access and where the only currency accepted is Bitcoin. As we have seen with statistics showing tremendous growth in alternative search engines, technology users worldwide have indeed adjusted their habits in the wake of Edward Snowden’s NSA revelations. We now learn from the Daily Dot that:
Edward Snowden’s revelations about National Security Agency data monitoring sent Internet users scrambling for ways to regain their privacy.
Since Snowden came forward with details about the NSA’s PRISM program in June, the number of global Tor users has doubled. Tor is a open source network by which users obscure their online activity by navigating a network of computer relays. In the U.S., the number of users has grown by more than 75 percent.
Graphs via metrics.torproject.org
Maybe that’s why Americans, far and away, lead the rates of average daily usage. Americans account for 17.54 percent of daily Tor traffic—the only nation to account for more than 10 percent.
“[This] is good,” wrote user dkcph. “[N]ot only from a political viewpoint but also from a security viewpoint. The main security problems with TOR is the lack of users. We can only hope the number of exit nodes also increases.”
Tor isn’t the only anonymity software to seek a spike in interest since Snowden’s revelation. By the end of July, the daily adoption rate for OpenPGP (Pretty Good Privacy) encryption software had tripled.
Full article here.
In Liberty,
Mike
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I don’t think there’s clear evidence of correlation here, let alone causation. Much as I’d like to see tor usage explode, there was no Tor use growth in June or July, and then it took off mid-August.
A theory floating around the webs is that the current usage spike is due to The Pirate Bay’s Pirate Browser. It’s basically another Tor Browser package, but with focus only on censorship avoidance and not anonymity. It was released on August 10th.
So I’d like to thank the Copyright Industry’s strong-arming tactics for introducing gobs of people to Tor. And even if they’re using it just to get to The Pirate Bay from England or the Netherlands, they’re still fighting the panopticon by using it.