Over the past few months, we’ve highlighted a number of Tor users abroad, many of whom use the program to circumvent national censorship. However, as Tor likes to point out, “normal” or regular people, who have no obvious reason (such as suspected surveillance or censorship), use Tor too. Perhaps they want to protect their privacy from identity thieves, or keep their communications hidden from irresponsible corporations. Maybe they’re doing research on sensitive subjects or want to protect their children’s identity online. Or perhaps they just consider using Tor a best practice for online safety.
Andrew Whitacre is one such user. A former researcher at Tufts University’s Feinstein International Center and the current Communications Manager for Comparative Media Studies and the Center for Future Civic Media at MIT [also funded by the Knight Foundation], Andrew began using Tor after reading Cory Doctorow's novel Little Brother, a novel in which a group of teenagers are apprehended by the Department of Homeland Security and held as enemy combatants for “suspicious behavior,” including the use of encryption technology on a cell phone. Whitacre jokes, “I'm not the only person who decided to use it after reading about it in [Doctorow’s novel], although--and don't read too much into this--I probably am the only person who downloaded it on his honeymoon.”
His story is simple: While working at Tufts, he had a number of colleagues who would take great pains to secure their personal safety but who did next to nothing to protect their electronic data. “That worried me,” says Whitacre, “While I didn't expect a Ugandan warlord to come to Medford and steal my computer, I still considered it a best practice while storing sensitive documents. I started using a simple countermeasure to protect their research drafts, the hard drive encryption software TrueCrypt.”
He states that his use of Tor is similar; just as he wouldn’t want someone to be able to access the information stored on his hard drive, he fears that the information he shares online could potentially be at risk as well. Although he is clear that he has little to worry about himself, he says that “if Cory Doctorow, Bruce Schneier, and the Bush Administration have taught us anything, it's that there are threats to privacy that we can't yet imagine. So I use programs like Tor because--to paraphrase Don Rumsfeld--they protect me against the known knowns, the known unknowns...and the unknown unknowns.”
