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The most common justification for Tor is that people in countries like China tha

ID: 653402 • Letter: T

Question

The most common justification for Tor is that people in countries like China that don't have full protections on free speech can use it to publish dissenting opinions or access foreign information. I don't understand how this protects them. Even though their governments cannot tell what information they're publishing etc, if the government is monitoring their internet connection they can still see if they are using Tor or not, and that is enough to compromise the dissident. So why is this considered a justification of Tor?

Explanation / Answer

TOR uses a set of proxies, relays and bridges to mask IP addresses. It also encrypts the connections between each relay with a 128 bit encryption, so it can be decent if I set myself to be a relay, for tor it would encrypt the ports it uses.

But it has to be used securely to be secure. Scripts that can decipher or decrypt live incoming traffic could just decrypt each node (relay) and find the traffic from there whether that be from another node or from the receiver's ISP. So they can monitor traffic feed but they would have to decrypt it when it's still live or if logs are present.   

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