Anonymous Browsing and TOR

I put a little more on my blog, but I thought I should post this here to see what anyone else thinks...

I have always been interested in the use of anonymous proxy servers but there has always been one problem for me; Who runs these proxy servers? the NSA, the CIA, the FBI, the Russian Mob, who knows? So I have always avoided them.

I haven't used off-the-shelf anonymizing products either. I don't trust them any more than I trust free services because these are corporations with a vested interest in keeping the status quo, they could also be owned by anybody, and even if they are "all about your privacy", I'm pretty sure they would turn over any information they had before a single warrant could get to their corporate offices. This paranoia has kind of left me between a rock and a hard place...

This weekend I have decided to get to know The TOR Project. The TOR project consists of universities and others who run a distributed proxy service. According to their mission statement

"...the Tor protects you by bouncing your communications around a distributed network of relays run by volunteers all around the world: it prevents somebody watching your Internet connection from learning what sites you visit, and it prevents the sites you visit from learning your physical location...
...Hundreds of thousands of people around the world use Tor for a wide variety of reasons: journalists and bloggers, human rights workers, law enforcement officers, soldiers, corporations, citizens of repressive regimes, and just ordinary citizens..."
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I decided that since as an American I am fast becoming a member of the "citizens of repressive regimes" category, so I should try to familiarize myself with TOR. So far I have been very pleased, every time I go to a website that logs your IP Address it thinks I am somewhere else... Canada, Romania, Harvard, you name it... I have more testing to do before I can state that it is secure but I like it so far.

I think Ill start posting more on my monkey blog as the tests go on. If any of you have any other suggestions, experiences, paranoid delusions, etc... I'd like to hear about it.

 

Thanks for the tip, great idea, my searches have become increasingly "bold"...gonna give it a test drive.
like you said you gotta wonder if one hop doesn't always include a bounce to "alpabet .org"."Tor-ing" now...