The Tor Project: Privacy for the Commons - Buenos Aires 2025

Hi, I'm Roger. Roger from tour. How many people were here on Sunday for the Cippher Punk Congress and saw me talk there? I see quite a few hands. Okay, great.

So, I'm going to uh talk a little bit once I have slides about uh uh what tour is and how it works and so on. But also, I'm going to aim to hit some things that I didn't talk about on Sunday, such as the censorship side of things, the onion service side of things and so on. Uh so tour is a free software project. Tour is a network of volunteers around the world. Tour is a community of researchers who are trying to figure out how to build better privacy tools.

Tour is a group of scientists and grad students and researchers who are uh working to break it and fix it and so on. Uh tour is a network. It's a protocol. It's a lot of different things in the in in the umbrella. So uh in terms of how it works, a lot of people look at it in terms of tour browser.

The it's a fork of Firefox that uh that tries to fix all the privacy level issues at the application layer. Um I'll I'll keep pausing until maybe we have some slides. Are we working on it? We're doing it. Okay, great.

Keep telling stories.

Okay. Yep. Um so the way that tour works in practice, there's a network of volunteer relay operators around the world. We have about 9,000 relay operators and your tour software, your tour browser builds a path through three of these relays and the goal is that no single relay gets to learn both where you are and also what you're connecting to. So, uh you can imagine a world where I'm in Tunisia and the Monopoly Telephone Company in Tunisia gets to see my internet connection.

and they get to see where that I'm connecting to tour, but they don't get to learn uh what I'm doing inside tour. Or maybe uh an adversary instead would be on the web server side. Maybe they're watching Wikileaks and they want to know who is connecting to Wikileaks in order to uh make a list of suspects or track people down or things like that. Or maybe the attacker somewhere in the middle of the network. Maybe it's NSA or AT&T or Deutsch Telecom or something like that.

Uh, so these are all sort of different adversaries that we think about in terms of how to how to protect you on the internet. I see that we're still messing with slides down here. Sounds great.

I'm going to get myself back on track. Okay. So, wow. I can see why Vitalik is wearing the sunglasses in each of these situations. Okay.

Um, so I talked about the anonymity side, how you uh what sort of adversaries we worry about. Another key thing to think about, anonymity is not the same as encryption. When you're using encryption, you should use encryption. But even then, somebody watching your network traffic is to learn who you're talking to, when you're talking to them, how much you're talking to them, and that metadata is the sort of thing that is exactly the sort of thing we're trying to protect. So there are a bunch of I guess we're also bit part of a bigger end toend encryption fight that's going on these days.

I'm going to keep holding my hand up here so that I can see any audience members. Um so the there's a fight going on in the WhatsApp world. There's a fight going on in the signal world and part of the challenge that we have is uh governments keep trying to put uh back doors or remove security from these sorts of things. and they're arguing that they need to do it in terms of uh we need we need everybody to be unsafe in order to be able to make people safe. And that is a a challenging ongoing discussion that uh it from our perspective as technologists of course the best way to protect all the people all the children all the the vulnerable marginalized people is to give them their own choice over whether they have encryption and so on.

So that's a that's an ongoing challenge that we need to keep thinking about in terms of how I frame these things for the world. So when I'm talking to the professors and grad students who are writing the research paper side, I work on anonymity. When I when I'm talking to my parents, I work on privacy tools because privacy tools are much more uh of a value that everybody can understand. When I'm talking to companies like Google and Walmart and so on, I work on communications security because if you go to a company and you say, "I've got a privacy tool," they're like, "Privacy is dead. The Oracle guy said so."

So trying to figure out how to frame these things to the different groups that you're talking to is is part of the key. And then when I talk to governments and militaries, I work on traffic analysis resistant communication networks. Again, it's the same security properties. It's the same network. It has to be the same network because you need your Egyptian activists and your FBI agents and your random people who just read the NSA spying article all into the same group.

If you built an anonymity system only for cancer survivors, then everybody will know why you're downloading that system, why you're participating in it, and suddenly you don't get the the the the diverse set of users that you hoped for. Okay. So, a lot of people here in in the in the recent years, uh, everybody who's watched any internet uh, advertisements have seen all the NordVPN. Don't worry, 100% bulletproof. We'll keep you safe.

We're in Switzerland. It'll be great. The The challenge with all the centralized systems out there, it always starts with, "We promise we're going to keep you 100% bulletproof safe." Okay. Okay.

We we do look at your traffic, but we promise we're not going to log anything. Okay. Of course, we write everything down, but we promise we're not going to uh reveal things. Okay. Well, of course, we answer subpoenas, and of course, we answer them from Saudi Arabia because they're a government, and we have to follow all governments.

So that that privacy by promise approach is a real challenge in in actually providing real privacy because uh you never there's no way to for you to verify and there's no way for you to learn whether they're following through now or whether they changed their mind and stopped following through later. Maybe the company got sold to a data mining corporation which seems to be what keeps happening to the VPN companies. So part of the