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I used Tor for surveillance. But an appropriate kind, IMHO.
I used Tor as a small part of one of the capabilities of a supply chain integrity startup. I built a fancy scraper/crawler to discreetly monitor a major international marketplace (mainstream, not darknet), including selecting appropriate Tor exit nodes for each regional site, to try to ensure that we were seeing the same site content that people from those regions were seeing.
Tor somehow worked perfectly for those needs. So my only big concern was making sure everyone in the startup knew not to go bragging about this unusually good data we had. Since we were one C&D letter away from not being able to get the data at all.
(Unfortunately, this had to be a little adversarial with the marketplace, not done as a data-sharing partnership, since the marketplace benefited from a cut of all the counterfeit and graymarket sales that we were trying to fight. But I made sure the scraper was gentle yet effective, both to not be a jerk, and also to not attract attention.)
(I can talk about it now, since the startup ran out of runway during Covid investor skittishness.)
This is not a good way to do this. Tor exit nodes are public and may be marked for special behavior by the marketplace you are surveying. There is no reason to believe you are getting good information this way.
The right way to do this would be through a VPN/tor + Residential proxy to hide your intentions from everyone involved.
Next time you find yourself in this situation, a $5 VPN subscription (Mullvad, etc.) gets you the same result without the IP being an obvious Tor exit node. Faster, too, in latency, bandwidth, and the time it takes to change locations. You only care about the VPN part for this, not the onion part.
> selecting appropriate Tor exit nodes for each regional site
So, a proxy? Onion routing doesn't really play a role for this use case.
HEH
I'm letting my imagination fill in the color on the specifics here and I'm working up a little grin.
A hat tip to you
Is it that difficult for a business to colo in various locations? Not rhetorical, I've never thought about it.
What was the scraper gathering specifically?
For anyone interested in this author’s book on Tor, it’s available for free download! https://direct.mit.edu/books/oa-monograph/5761/TorFrom-the-D... (full disclosure: i work for MIT Press)
It's a really good book! I was on the very edges of this scene for a chunk of the time described, and I thought it managed to catch a lot of the complexities without picking one possible narrative over another.
Plus I learned a lot -- it came out of some academic research that pursued a unique angle: finding and talking to the Tor exit node operators about their experiences, rather than just say the developers, the executives, or the funders.
You can also buy it if you want to support the autor. https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262548182/tor/
Thanks for that. Is it available as epub? I would like to read it on Kindle.
I think they publicized it so they could obscurely use it for military purposes. The users are easy to spot if they are all military users. Get tons and tons of regular users to use it and you obscure who is trying to hide.
It's unclear if they really did this, or if this was just the pitch they gave to the government. But it was never secret that this was a goal they had explained to the US government: the inventors were pretty straightforward about everything.
I've also read this at some point. Bit hard to have deniability if you're hacking into $ENEMY_COUNTRY servers using a network that only the US Government has access to.
This is exactly it from what I have heard. I have heard this from a large number of trustworthy sources over the years.
Btw, a Tor relay can be relatively lightweight. I run one on a $5/mo VPS (which does many other things). You need 1 GiB of RAM, but a single basic CPU core largely suffices. My relay sends/receives ~150 GiB of traffic per day (~15 Mbits/s). It’s not an exit node, so no legal worries.
Here’s my torrc:
SocksPort 0
ExitRelay 0
ORPort NNNN
DirPort NNNN
Nickname X
ContactInfo X@X.com
RelayBandwidthRate 80 megabits
RelayBandwidthBurst 120 megabits
MaxMemInQueues 384 megabytes
AvoidDiskWrites 1
HardwareAccel 1
NoExec 1
NumCPUs 1
$ sudo systemctl edit tor@default
[Service]
Nice=15
CPUAffinity=0
CPUWeight=60
StartupCPUWeight=6
IOWeight=60
TimerSlackNSec=100us
MemoryMax=896M
MemoryHigh=800M
OOMScoreAdjust=1000
LimitAS=2G
LimitNPROC=512
LimitNOFILE=10240
PrivateDevices=true
ProtectSystem=true
ProtectHome=trueI'd never used Tor, though had to scrape a bunch of things that required different IPs. I figured their endpoints were already tarred.
With the porn block in the UK though, the "New Private Window with Tor" in Brave is very convenient.
Maybe not for long, or maybe not. I guess websites don't need to comply beyond a certain point.
There are tons of "residential proxy" and whatnot type services available, IP being a source of truth doesn't seem to matter much in 2025. The Perplexity 'bot' recent topic being an example of that.
Basically if you want to access any resource on the web for a dollar a GB or so you can use millions of IPs.
>With the porn block in the UK though, the "New Private Window with Tor" in Brave is very convenient.
Has someone interested in seeing privacy secured into the future, I’ve been happy that governments are accelerating their censorship for this reason.
Indeed, I've investigated some cyber attacks recently that came from residential IPs in California and NY, though investigation turned up the real origins as coming from India. It's pretty easy to pull off nowadays
The problem with most infrastructure is that there's a big gap in security where it centralizes, and its transparent.
To understand how, you should review the Princeton Report's Raptor attack, and understand how it works (2015).
I ran a bridge until recently, but the server died a heat death after I moved to another apartment :(
I have not yet had time to find a suitable replacement machine. But running a bridge is a cheap, safe low network volume method people can help out from home. I had it going to help people in 'bad' countries to get out to the rest of the world.
> I ran a bridge until recently
A lifetime ago, I ran bridges from RAM only distros. But early versions of the Dan list (1st in wide use) killed that.
DL didn't try hard to differentiate between bridge IPs and exit IPs. Server hosts just grabbed the first list they saw and blocked with it.
It was years before the notion of Exit != Bridge became understood but everyone had moved on. We're at the entropic 'No One Cares Anymore' phase now.
If you already have an understanding of how Tor works and want to know how attacks on it work, read these!
- https://github.com/mikeperry-tor/vanguards/blob/master/READM...
- https://github.com/mikeperry-tor/vanguards/blob/master/READM...
- https://spec.torproject.org/proposals/344-protocol-info-leak...
I assume when I’m using Tor that every packet is the under the highest level of collection/analysis priority. I think maybe sometimes it’s better to blend into in the crowd
that short-term thinking is what makes it impossible to blend in the long run
I've never felt like I knew how to use Tor correctly, or trusted anyone to be able to guide me on that.
Simply download the Tor Browser [1], which is simply a hardened version of Firefox that connects to the Tor network.
Don't install addons in this browser. Don't resize the browser window. All tor browsers instances have the same default window size, which prevents websites from tracking you. Obviously don't login into websites with your regular email or provide websites with your PII.
If you are in a country or on a network that blocks the basic Tor network, the FAQ explains how to get around this by using Tor bridges or other techniques [2].
That's pretty much all you need to know.
I sympathise with a bit of paranoia about this. Personally, I'd use a platform like "Tails" (do your own research) which wraps Tor up in a USB bootable Linux OS.
The generally recommended way is to download Tails to a USB thumb drive and boot off of that. This is safer than just using the TOR browser and if something does attack your system none of your actual data is on the OS.
Back when I tried, it was a modified Firefox build.
Tor is nice, but I still prefer i2p.
I think i2p will eventually replace Tor. Or should replace. Because Tor has inherent issue with de-anonymisation: you just need to deploy certain number of nodes to facilitate that. And there’s no way of knowing if certain agencies already did that.
I2P is a superior network design. It's a shame it gets so little attention.
But it is more difficult to run
It's all about trust
i wish they were also a lifeline for censorship too, tor is effectively non functional in many countries :(
tor tries very hard to bypass censorship. Have you tried the numerous Tor bridges, or the new Snowflake p2p bridge?
Tor is hardly private IMO. Whoever has the largest no of servers can see all the traffic
Whoever has the largest no of servers can see all the traffic
Is that true?
If there are a million servers, and I control ten of them, and everyone else who has control of servers controls only nine each (so I have the largest number of servers, as you say), surely I will be missing out on almost all the traffic?
How could they ensure that they always control the entry and exit nodes?
Do you suppose all entities able and willing to do this would cooperate with each other?
Especially as the internet, itself, started as a military project. [DARPA]
Friendly reminder that exit nodes are to be avoided. Hidden services are the way to go.
Isn't Tor dead? Wasn't it infiltrated long ago?
>Tor: How a military project became a lifeline for privacy
Arpanet: How a military project gutted personal privacy, destabilized self esteem and strangled attention spans
And now its all honey pot exit nodes.
Just setup a vpn.