Onions for good: how the TOR network can be used for good
Edgar ter Danielyan
?? Security engineer & penetration tester. BCS Chartered Fellow. CREST registered practitioner. Published author. Accredited expert witness. Ex Skype, Microsoft, Deloitte, RBS, Citibank.
TOR - The Onion Router network - is well-known for its use by all sorts of criminals for all sorts of unwholesome activities. It is important to remember, however, that it can be and is also a force for good too, particularly in places where free access to information and communications is restricted by dictatorships.
For example, Freedom House’s “Freedom in the World” report assesses the state of political rights and civil liberties in 210 countries and territories. In the 2024 edition, 57 countries were rated as “Not Free,” and 56 were rated as “Partly Free.”
This indicates that 113 countries, or more than half of all countries, do not fully meet the criteria for a “Free” status.
One of the most effective ways to provide uncensored and private access to a website is to run it directly on the TOR network, using a .onion address, thus avoiding the public Internet completely.
Unlike regular Internet host addresses that resolve through the Domain Name System (DNS) and are reachable on the normal Web, .onion addresses rely on TOR's decentralised, layered encryption to route data through TOR nodes, never leaving the privacy of the TOR network and therefore masking the IP addresses of both the host and the user.
Here are some of the organisations and resources that have .onion addresses, offering unparalleled censorship resistance and privacy of access:
DuckDuckGo
The New York Times
ProtonMail
BBC News
The Guardian
Radio Free Europe
Deutsche Welle
Needless to say your normal Web browser will not be able to open the above .onion sites, but you can download the free Tor Browser from https://www.torproject.org to be able to use these and other .onion resources.