December 17, 2010 Granting Anonymity By VIRGINIA HEFFERNAN <http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/h/virginia_heffer...> *Transparency is* secretive business. WikiLeaks, the swashbuckling new-media organization whose motto is "We open governments," relies on a technology of extreme reticence called Tor Hidden Services --- a part of the Tor Project, a nonprofit organization dedicated not to light and clarity but to shadows and opacity, to the increasingly difficult art of keeping secrets online. A deliberately byzantine system of virtual tunnels that conceal the origins and destinations of data, and thus the identity of clients, Tor has been around since 2001, when programmers from M.I.T. <http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/m/massachu...> and the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory introduced it at a California security conference. In the past year, supported by grants from the U.S. government and other funders, the Tor Project has prolifically expanded its networks. The software has been downloaded more than 36 million times this year, and thousands of nameless volunteers --- many of them Tor clients --- now help to relay mind-bogglingly diverse Tor data in nearly every country on earth. Peaceniks and human rights groups use Tor, as do journalists, private citizens and the military, and the heterogeneity and farflungness of its users --- together with its elegant source code --- keep it unbreachable. When a communication arrives from Tor, you can never know where or whom it's from. Tor is by design not a media project or a human rights one or (anymore) a military one. Jacob Appelbaum, a developer for Tor who travels the world explaining Tor to human rights and social-justice activists, tells me that users periodically complain about the politics and motivations of other (self-identified) users. What they don't grasp is that if Tor were cohesive --- physically or ideologically --- its members could be identified. As Appelbaum explained, "If it's only the military using the Tor network" --- say --- "it's not anonymous." A Tor transmission these days might start in Addis Ababa, hop to Dallas, then to Stockholm and finally Johannesburg. (There are some 2,000 Tor relay nodes at any one time across the globe.) The only thing the Johannesburg recipient can discover is that the data came from Tor, and Tor has successfully identified itself with no person or group, only with ideological incoherence. For the person trying to get a message out through Tor, this means he communicates exactly as much as he chooses and no more. With Tor, you "only reveal the information that you type," Appelbaum says. "As opposed to all the other information that comes along when you use your computer. [...] Continua qui: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/19/magazine/19FOB-Medium-t.html