Sam Spade's San Francisco

Earlier today I was among a number of people who used to try and get important information into and out of Iran. One of the tweets I sent was about an interesting program called Tor. The installation instructions for Tor, written in Farsi, is a particularly valuable commodity. It was a link to those instructions ( https://www.torproject.org/torbrowser/index.html.fa ) that I was sending out through Twitter.

I was impressed with Tor and I want to share it with you.

Here is a description of Tor taken directly from their website:

Tor is free software and an open network that helps you defend against a form of network surveillance that threatens personal freedom and privacy, confidential business activities and relationships, and state security known as .

Tor protects you by bouncing your communications around a distributed network of relays run by volunteers all around the world: it prevents somebody watching your Internet connection from learning what sites you visit, and it prevents the sites you visit from learning your physical location. Tor works with many of your existing applications, including web browsers, instant messaging clients, remote login, and other applications based on the TCP protocol.

Hundreds of thousands of people around the world use Tor for a wide variety of reasons: journalists and bloggers, human rights workers, law enforcement officers, soldiers, corporations, citizens of repressive regimes, and just ordinary citizens. See the page for examples of typical Tor users. See the for a more detailed explanation of what Tor does, and why this diversity of users is important.

Tor doesn't magically encrypt all of your Internet activities, though. You should .

Tor's security improves as its user base grows and as more people volunteer to . (It isn't nearly as hard to set up as you might think, and can significantly enhance your own security.) If running a relay isn't for you, we need , and we need funds to continue making the Tor network faster and easier to use while maintaining good security.

Tor is a registered 501(c)(3) non-profit whose mission is to allow you to protect your Internet traffic from analysis. Please make a

.