We interviewed Al Smith from The Tor Project—a nonprofit behind one of the world’s most important privacy tools. In this interview, Tor shares how its work protects human rights defenders, journalists, and everyday users in high-risk environments, and why sustaining public-interest infrastructure like Tor is essential to the health of the Internet itself.
Tor is often described as critical infrastructure for privacy, freedom of expression, and human rights online. First, can you explain what Tor is, and then how you see Tor Project’s role in advancing the public good, especially in repressive or high-risk environments?
In very basic terms, Tor is a program you can run on your computer that helps keep you safe on the Internet. The Tor Project is a nonprofit (charity) organization that maintains and develops the Tor software. The Tor network is a pipeline that carries data from a user’s device to their destination website. This pipeline is built in such a way that the user’s information is kept private. Nobody–not even the Tor Project–along the pipeline can see both who is making a request and where they are going.
Other applications and websites can hook up to the Tor network, allowing their users’ traffic to pass through the same private pipeline. It is because access to the Tor network is free, open, and available to anybody that Tor is considered a piece of critical infrastructure.
As an organization with a mission to advance human rights, Tor Project focuses on making the Tor network and Tor-powered tools both safe and easy to use for people in repressive or dangerous situations. With press freedom declining globally, the targeting of activists and human rights defenders for what they say online, and the rise of authoritarianism, being able to safely and privately share information without fear is vital. Tor is one part of the toolkit.
Why did Tor Project choose to operate as a nonprofit rather than a for-profit company, and how does that shape your mission and approach?
Operating as a nonprofit allows us to focus on building the most private tools we can–without ever having to compromise user privacy in order to generate profit for shareholders.
The modern Internet is extractive: for-profit companies vacuum up user data and user behavior. This data collection happens covertly, behind the scenes, as users check their email for order receipts, update their calendars for date night, save their favorite recipes, and search the web for medical advice. These for-profit companies then use this raw material to create profit: through selling ads, selling highly detailed personal information to other companies, and optimizing their sites and services to keep people scrolling and purchasing.
This is where Tor is different: the Tor Project’s primary goal is to allow people to access the Internet privately and without interference. This goal is fundamentally antithetical to the most common business plans of for-profit companies offering digital services. Instead of taking advantage of Internet users for profit, the privacy that Tor tools provide allow users to actively choose when to share their data, and with whom.
Can you share a story where Tor made a tangible difference in a high-stakes environment?
In September 2022, Jîna “Mahsa” Amini was arrested by the moral police in Iran for not wearing the hijab, and she later died under suspicious circumstances. In response, protests in support of women’s rights took place all across Iran.
As a result of these protests, the Iranian central government expanded its existing censorship against social media sites, global news outlets, and censorship circumvention tools in an attempt to stomp out conversation. Almost all of the common ways Iranians gather online, and communicate with the world, were suddenly unavailable.
During this time of increased censorship, Iranian use of the Tor network exploded. Users were turning to Tor to access otherwise inaccessible sites and services online. Tor allowed Iranians to stay connected to one another–and to the global conversation–during an important period of civil action.
Tor was able to help Iranians in this scenario in part because we take novel, research-validated anti-censorship technology and scale it for real-world use. Additionally, before this increase in censorship occurred, we were already connected to people in the Iranian diaspora because we invest in community through digital security training, in-person user research partnerships, and localizing all of our tools into languages most relevant to at-risk groups.
Funding for digital public goods is notoriously challenging. What are the biggest financial or sustainability challenges Tor faces today, and how are you working to overcome them?
Governments worldwide are cutting grants that serve the public, from digital public goods to medical research. Traditional foundations are strained under the weight of increased demand from their existing grantees. Corporations are riding an uncertain economy and slashing their charitable giving. These challenges affect just about every nonprofit, and the Tor Project is no exception.
We’re working to overcome these challenges by investing in individual philanthropy. Some of our most loyal donors have been giving $10 a month for years, and we’re looking to them to teach us about why Tor matters to them–and what about our messaging resonates with them (or not!) so we can bring this message to wider audiences. Expanding and refining how we engage individuals has helped us to become more sustainable… ultimately the Tor community is the Tor Project’s most valuable asset.
If the Tor Project were to shut down, what would the impact be on the global privacy and cybersecurity landscape? Who or what would be most affected?
The Tor network is the most widely used network of its kind, with an average of 2.3 million users connected to Tor network at any given moment during the day. Tor shutting down would impact all of these users, but in some cases it would have extreme and immediate impacts. For people living in highly repressive places like Turkmenistan, where most of the Internet is blocked and access to VPNs is prohibitively expensive, Tor shutting down would cut people off from the Internet entirely. For human rights defenders in high-risk environments who use Tor in order to advocate for change, losing Tor would mean being exposed to surveillance that could lead to being arrested, jailed, and in some circumstances, killed.
How can efforts like Common Good Cyber do more to support and sustain public-good resources like Tor Project?
Cyberattacks, censorship, and surveillance are on the rise for marginalized and vulnerable people, human rights defenders, civil society organizations and NGOs. Common Good Cyber and efforts like it can provide long term, flexible funds to digital public goods (DPGs), as well as funds to address cybersecurity risks internally and for DPG partner organizations. This kind of support is both difficult to secure and extremely impactful for organizations and individuals that sustain digital public goods. With supportive and trusting funders, Tor and other proven digital public goods can better support their safety online.
