Tor: From the Dark Web to the Future of Privacy
by Ben Collier
MIT Press
ISBN: 978-0-262-54818-2
The Internet began as a decentralized system designed to reroute traffic in case a part of the network was taken out by a bomb. Far from being neutral, the technology intentionally supported the democratic ideals of its time: freedom of expression, freedom of access to information, and freedom to code – that is, build new applications for the Internet without needing permission. Over the decades since, IT has relentlessly centralized. Among the counterweights to this consolidation is Tor, “the onion routing”.
In Tor: From the Dark Web to the Future of Privacy (free for download), Ben Collier recounts a biography that seems to recapitulate those early days – but so far with a different outcome.
Collier traces Tor’s origins to the late Ross Anderson‘s 1997 paper The Eternity Service. In it, Anderson proposed a system for making information indelible by replicating it anonymously across a large number of machines of unknown location so that it would become too expensive to delete it (or, in Anderson’s words, “drive up the cost of selection service denial attacks”). That sort of redundancy is fundamental to the way the Internet works for communications. Around the same time, people were experimenting with ways of routing information such as email through multiple anonymized channels in order to protect it from interference – much used, for example, to protect those exposing Scientology’s secrets. Anderson himself indicated the idea’s usefulness in guaranteeing individual liberties.
As Collier writes, in those early days many spoke as though the Internet’s technology was sufficient to guarantee the export of democratic values to countries where they were not flourishing. More recently, I’ve seen arguments that technology is inherently anti-democratic. Both takes attribute to the technology motivations that properly belong to its controllers and owners.
This is where Collier’s biography strikes a different course by showing the many adaptations the the project has made since its earliest discussions circa 2001* between Roger Dingledine and Nick Mathewson to avoid familiar trends such as centralization and censorship – think the trends that got us the central-point-of-failuire Internet Archive instead of the Eternity Server. Because it began later, Dingledine and Mathewson were able to learn from previous efforts such as PGP and Zero Knowledge Systems to spread strong encryption and bring privacy protection to the mainstream. One such lesson was that the mathematical proofs that dominated cryptography were less important than ensuring usability. At the same time, Collier watches Dingledine and Mathewson resist the temptation to make a super-secure mode and a “stupid mode” that would become the path of least resistance for most users, jeopardizing the security of the entire network.
Most technology biographies focus on one or two founders. Faced with a sprawling system, Collier has resisted that temptation, and devotes a chapter each to the project’s technological development, relay node operators, and maintainers. The fact that these are distinct communities, he writes, has helped keep the project from centralizing. He goes on to discuss the inevitable emergence of criminal uses for Tor, its use as a tool for activism, and finally the future of privacy.
To those who have heard of Tor only as a browser used to access the “dark web” the notion that it deserves a biography may seem surprising. But the project ambitions have grown over time, from privacy as a service, to privacy as a structure, to privacy as a struggle. Ultimately, he concludes, Tor is a hack that has penetrated the core of Internet infrastructure, designing around control points. It is, in other words, much closer to the Internet the pioneers said they were building than the Internet of Facebook and Google.
*This originally said “founding in 2006; that is when the project created today’s formal non-profit organization.
If the book claims that Tor was founded in 2006, it has problems with simple facts. I know I spoke with Roger and Nick while I was still at Zero-Knowledge, which I left in 2003.
That’s my fault, not Collier’s. It’s the date Wikipedia gives, and I believe is the date that Tor became a non-profit organization. You’re right that it was founded earlier, and I will go back to the book and get the right date. I did know its origins were earlier, since I used to see Roger Dingledine around Computers, Freedom, and Privacy and other events. I did not know you worked at Zero Knowledgge, though!
wg