Tor

The object

Tor — "The Onion Router" — had its first public release on 20 September 2002, based on onion-routing research from the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory. It wraps traffic in layers of encryption and bounces it through volunteer-run relays so that no single point knows both who you are and what you are doing.

Anonymity needs company

Tor's central insight is social, not just cryptographic: a system that hides one person is useless, because that person stands out. Anonymity only works as a crowd. So Tor was released free and open, and it survives on relays run by volunteers worldwide — its security is, literally, a community.

Why it matters

Tor carries PGP's argument forward a decade. PGP hid the contents of a message; Tor hides the fact and pattern of communication itself. It became essential infrastructure for journalists, dissidents, and ordinary people under surveillance — and a permanent point of tension between privacy as a right and the state's desire to see. The phreaker's question about who controls a network is still being asked, now in onion layers.

The lesson it set loose

Some freedoms can only be built collectively. You cannot be private alone on a network; privacy at scale is a public good that has to be volunteered into existence. Tor made anonymity an infrastructure project — and proved that a commons can defend the individual.