As a means of online privacy, Tor, or The Onion Router, is considered one of the most, if not the most, reliable and secure. However, there are people who are (understandably) somewhat hesitant to embrace its use. And they have a good reason or two for it.
As this Pando article very clearly shows, Tor is created and funded by and for the US government. Its accessibility for a regular Joe is more of a side effect, although an intended one. It is meant to attract more people and lure them into using Tor since the more people use it apart from the US military and intelligence agents, the less conspicuous it is. This way, it becomes not just a governmental network so that everyone using it can be reliably identified as an agent of the state but a seemingly privacy-friendly technology that can be used by anyone. Therefore, a surveillance agent can’t be so easily recognized. What it means is the NSA and other spooks can use Tor for its anonymity while not having to worry about being too suspicious. So it can be said that everybody who uses Tor does, in a way, enables surveillance agencies to blend into the crowd. It should be noted that while it uses Tor for its purposes, the NSA does in no way control it fully. To be fair to The Onion Router, it is somewhat of a fishbone in the throat of the FVEY surveillance agencies. After all, it has to do its job well enough to be employed by the Navy, the Department of Defense, and the NSA. The drawback (from the above institutions’ standpoint) is that a similar level of anonymity is granted to those “smokescreen” folks who also use Tor. Naturally, it attracts not only honest netizens who do not want to be spied on but also all kinds of criminals and extremists. To counter that, intelligence agencies have made attempts to “fingerprint” people visiting the Tor website or even just looking it up on search engines. It means that the more interest someone shows in their online privacy, the more likely they are to get on a special service’s list of potential suspects. Moreover, the NSA also has the tech that allows it to determine Tor users as well as put major Tor servers under surveillance. Another downside of using Tor is its rather dark reputation, firmly branded into the minds of users and non-users both. It is, if you will, a side effect of the side effect—the promise of full anonymity brings many unsavory elements to Tor. Even though the network itself is just a way of accessing the infamous Dark Web, it is still strongly associated with it. This fact alone would make it all but impossible to convince many people to use Tor. Indeed, this stigma is one of the reasons for the intel agencies’ interest in Tor users. However, for those privacy-minded Tor looks almost too good not to use. Not only does it provide considerable volumes of security, but it also is free of charge. But since its security, as we’ve seen above, is a sort of a double-edged sword, there is a question begging to be asked: What are some alternatives to using Tor? Luckily, it is possible to protect one’s online security for free without Tor. Virtual private networks, or VPNs, are designed to encrypt users’ Internet traffic so that no one besides the user can tell what that traffic is. With a VPN, a user’s IP-address appears to be different than their real one to the websites they visit and any possible spies. The only problem is that most good VPNs are not free. However, it doesn’t mean that all of them are. There are services that provide strong encryption protocols and diverse server locations for free. Let’s look at the example of VPN Gate, created as an academic experiment at the University of Tsukuba. According to Cooltechzone, it offers its users more than 6,000 servers in six countries, which is pretty impressive considering the fact that it’s completely free. It’s another advantage is its relatively low profile. It makes the chances of its servers being recognized and blocked by websites much lower. If you’re looking for a more well-known alternative, such industry giants as NordVPN almost always offer a free trial or a guaranteed refund, so you can use their services essentially for free. In the end, it is up to everybody whether or not they trust Tor or their VPN provider. But a good rule of thumb here is not to be too trusting. Of anyone.
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