STUDIO TORIUMI / GUIDE
What the Tor browser actually does — and what it doesn't. How to get it, how to find .onion links, and what it will not protect you from. The last part matters most, so it's the longest: there really was a case where someone was identified without their encryption ever being broken.
Browse the web normally, and the site's server sees your IP address, while your internet provider sees which sites you visit. Someone always knows both at once — that's the normal state of affairs.
Tor puts three relays in between. Your traffic is encrypted in three layers, and each relay peels off only its own layer. That's why it's called an onion.
Of the three, not one of them
knows both who and what.
The technology was originally developed with support from the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory, and is now developed and run by the nonprofit Tor Project. Its users are far from criminals only: citizens living under censorship, newsrooms protecting whistleblowers, reporters who can't reveal themselves, people escaping domestic abuse — and people who simply don't want to be watched.
bridges sometimes still get you throughThis is the one point on which you should not compromise. Fake Tor browsers really exist. Ones that look identical and snoop on your traffic have been distributed before. Download only from the official site. Not from search-result ads, not from links on round-up sites.
The official source is torproject.org/download. It's available for Windows, macOS, Linux, and Android — in Japanese too — and it's free.
For countries where the official site itself is blocked, there's also a way to receive it by email (GetTor).
Addresses ending in .onion are sites that exist only inside Tor. They aren't registered in DNS and won't open in a normal browser. Because traffic never leaves the Tor network, not even the exit relay can see the contents.
The current format (v3) runs 56 characters long. The unreadability is by design: the address itself is the public key. A short, memorable .onion address is almost always a fake.
Sites calling themselves ".onion link lists" are countless, and nobody vouches for what's on them. Scams, illegal material, and traps are all mixed together. Here, I'll only cover following trails from places with a clear identity.
.onion addresses. Start there.onion addresses news organizations publish themselves. ProPublica was first in 2016, the New York Times followed in 2017, and the BBC runs one for its World Service. Use the address printed on each organization's own website. Don't pick them up from third-party listsThis page deliberately carries no grab-bag of links. The moment I list them, it becomes "this site recommended them" — and nobody can know what any of them will look like tomorrow. Copy addresses from the official website of whoever runs the service. That is the only path that can actually be verified.
Tor's encryption has not been broken, as far as anyone knows. And yet people still get identified. What gets broken isn't the encryption — it's everything around it.
DECEMBER 2013 · UNITED STATES
A student who didn't want to sit his final exams sent a bomb threat over Tor from a disposable email account. Tor worked exactly as designed. The origin of the email was never cracked.
He was identified anyway. The reason is simple: at that hour, almost the only person connecting to Tor from the campus network was him. The university simply went through its connection logs for devices that had reached Tor's relays, and worked down the list.
The fact that you use Tor is not itself hidden. Where few people use it, the very act of using it becomes a marker.
This is known as a correlation attack. Tor keeps delaying and shuffling of traffic to a minimum, for the sake of speed. So an adversary positioned to observe both the volume and timing of what enters the entry relay and what leaves the exit can match the two ends together.
State-scale observers and large ISPs fall into this category. The Tor Project itself publishes this limitation. It is not a hidden weakness.
Encryption can't protect you from what you say —
or from your own habits.
Built as a whistleblower intake system and used by more than 60 news organizations worldwide: the New York Times, the Washington Post, ProPublica, The Intercept, and others. It was originally written by Aaron Swartz.
As the sender, you open the organization's .onion in the Tor browser and send your material. Even the journalist receiving it doesn't know who sent it. Replies come through a code generated on the site. It's far safer than standing up your own anonymous site — and you know exactly who it reaches.
.onion siteTechnically, it can be done. You can publish something running on your own computer without revealing a single IP address. No domain to buy, no server to rent.
But the hard part isn't setting it up. It's never making a single mistake afterward. A server misconfiguration leaks your real IP, metadata survives in an uploaded file, you absent-mindedly open the admin panel over your home connection — one slip is the end. And there is no redo. If your physical safety depends on it, use something established like SecureDrop rather than building your own.
Simply using Tor is not illegal in Japan. Downloading it and using it are both unrestricted. What gets called into question is what you do with it — as with any other tool.
2012 · JAPAN
Someone hijacked strangers' computers via an online bulletin board and posted criminal threats from them. The perpetrator used Tor to cover their tracks.
Four people were wrongly arrested. The posts were coming from computers that had been taken over.
Tor hides the person using it, but it doesn't protect the person being used. And sometimes someone who isn't hiding gets suspected in place of someone who is — as a lesson about anonymity technology, I think that's what this case really left behind.
One more thing: running a Tor relay in Japan — an exit node especially — comes with legal and practical complications, because other people's traffic leaves the internet from your line. Using Tor and operating a relay are entirely different matters.
This page is an independent explainer written by one person, with no affiliation to the Tor Project. Accuracy is the aim, but both the technology and the situation change. Always read the official documentation before actually using any of this. If your safety is on the line, don't rely on this page — consult a support organization that specializes in that field.