Learn about Tor and internet privacy, April 18

The Center for Cybersecurity and Trusted Foundations at Arizona State University would like to invite you to the upcoming colloquium series with speaker Roger Dingledine.

Tor: Internet privacy in the age of big surveillance
Friday, April 18, 2025
Noon–1 p.m.
Artisan Court at the Brickyard (BYAC) 210 , Tempe campus [map]
Attend online via Zoom 

Abstract: Tor is a free-software anonymizing network that helps people around the world use the Internet in safety. Tor’s 10000 volunteer relays carry traffic for millions of daily users, including ordinary citizens who want protection from identity theft and prying corporations, corporations who want to look at a competitor’s website in private, people around the world whose Internet connections are censored, and even governments and law enforcement. In this talk Dingledine will take you on a tour of the Tor landscape, starting with a crash course on Tor, how it works, and what security it provides. He will explain why Tor’s open design and radical approach to transparency are critical to its success, and then compare the censorship circumvention arms race to the nation-state surveillance arms race. We’ll examine why privacy is necessary for human rights, and end with a discussion of onion services, which are essentially an even stronger version of https, but which you might instead know from confusing phrases like “the dark web”.

Bio: Roger Dingledine is co-founder and original developer of the Tor Project, a nonprofit that develops free and open source software to protect people from tracking, censorship and surveillance online. Wearing one hat, Dingledine works with journalists and activists on many continents to help them understand and defend against the threats they face. Wearing another, he is a prominent researcher in the online anonymity field, coordinating and mentoring academic researchers working on Tor-related topics. Since 2002, he has helped organize the yearly international Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium. Among his achievements, Roger co-authored the Tor design paper that won the Usenix Security “Test of Time” award, EFF picked him for a Pioneer Award, and he has been recognized by Foreign Policy magazine as one of its top 100 global thinkers.