How to use TOR - The Onion Router

TOR - The Onion Router is associated in most peoples minds with "the Dark Web". While this is true Tor is also a useful tool for those that live in suppressed regimes where freedom of speech is controlled.

TOR is the "catch word" of the (hacker) story writer (journalist) that the technology press publish.

There is a difference between the TOR Private Browser and TOR itself. The TOR "transport", for want of a better description, runs in the background to the browser and you have the ability to configure this with respect to Exit Servers and other general privacy settings.

In the past I had worked out how to specify the country that TOR "exits", this was the basis on how I managed to access the BBC from Canada.

How I have used TOR

As I say above I had worked out how to get Tor to "exit" at a specific location on the Internet.

I had many pages on this subject onmy Canadian website and the NSA revelations by Edward Snowden and The Guardian.

NSA - National Security Agency (USA)

The NSA claimed, as part of their PRISM project, that they had "cracked" TOR. The sub-project was called TORSPLOIT.

At the time, 2007 to 2012, I was using TOR to access the BBC from outside the UK and I had worked out a method to force TOR to "exit" in a specific country. This was achieved by adding a configuration setting to the TOR client. I also studied the operation of TOR and was pretty certain that the NSA, or any of their contractors or "whiz-kids", had NOT found a method to determine either the location or the content of web traffic of those that used it.

The law enforcement deployed the Cornhusker on three servers that were hosting several anonymous child pornography websites. The Torsploit was designed to trigger flaws in the Flash component inside the Tor Browser. According to the documents obtained by the DailyDot, Cornhusker is no longer in use, it was replaced by the “Network Investigative Technique” (NIT) to obtain IP and MAC addresses of Tor users. Unfortunately, the NIT usage was not considered legitimate by the court during a hearing on the shut down of the world’s largest dark web child pornography site, PlayPen.

TORSPLOIT

One of the programs (sic) the formed part of the PRISM project (again sic) was TORSPLOIT. The question is: did it work and how did it work?

On first look it seemed that Matthew Edman, a former developer for TOR, found a way to break TOR. On closer inspection it seems that TORSPLOIT was just the development of malware, possibly called Cornhusker, that infected suspected TOR users computers and that malware then revealed there identities.

At the time the revelations the Edward Snowden were being reported by the Guardian were that TOR had been "broken".