Tor: an anonymous Internet communication system

The right to speak anonymously is protected by the First Amendment in the United States and is crucial for safety, privacy, and free expression on the global Internet. People who need anonymity online range from whistleblowers and political dissidents to people giving tips to the police and kids who are exploring online.

Tor helps these people by allowing them to communicate anonymously on the Internet. It can anonymize web browsing, instant messaging, IRC, SSH, and more. Your identity is hidden because communications are bounced around a distributed network of servers called onion routers -- this system makes it hard for recipients, observers, and even the onion routers themselves to track the source of the stream.

Tor development is now supported by a grant from the Electronic Frontier Foundation. The more people use Tor and volunteer to run servers, the better this service will be. Please consider installing it and then helping out. You can also learn more about Tor here.

Remember that this is development code -- it's not a good idea to rely on the current Tor network if you really need strong anonymity.

2004-12-01: Tor 0.0.9rc5 is released. [download]
2004-10-14: Tor 0.0.8.1 is released. [download]

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