Tor is critical infrastructure across several very different spectra:
- The underlying Tor proxy is the component that many internet freedom projects, from Briar to Onion Browser, rely on for their security properties.
- The Tor Project is the origin and center of the pluggable transports idea, where our modularity means that tools like Lantern and Tunnelbear can (and do) directly reuse our obfs4 system for their own censorship circumvention goals.
- OONI is increasingly becoming recognized as a core building block in assessing and understanding Internet censorship around the world.
- Our browser changes in Tor Browser are changing the landscape of browser security, for example with Firefox declaring fingerprinting resistance as one of their top next priorities, and with Firefox and Brave and others wanting to bake Tor in to their "actually private browser mode" plans.
- Facebook, New York Times, Securedrop, and many others have adopted Tor onion services as a safer security layer ("like https but better") for their users to reach their websites and other services.
Some years ago the US Congress asked DRL to do a study of their funded projects, and one of the findings was that Tor was central to half of their projects at the time: https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RR794.html (see pages 73-74) That is, those projects wouldn't be able to accomplish their goals without relying on Tor for security and privacy and censorship resistance.
We've always known Tor was in the middle of many efforts to improve lives around the world, but we would be wise to write this up in a way that others can recognize.
Here are some potential concrete next steps:
* A blog post with the above details and others that we brainstorm, to pull together all the parts of Tor that are critical infrastructure for other projects.
* A condensed version for our future website, so the topic doesn't get lost in an old blog post.
* A brochure-sized version that we can print out and give out at booths and conferences, alongside the "run a relay" advocacy brochures.
* An intermediate-size version that we can use in funding proposals to remind funders of our critical role in this space -- not just for the traditional "internet freedom" funders but also for foundations and major donors and others who need help understanding our world.
(On this last point, I had a discussion with one of our DRL program managers about Tor-as-critical-infrastructure, and he reminded me that DRL's charter is to not fund infrastructure. But even that is fine: everybody wants to see the stuff they fund get transitioned to broader use, and even when we aren't asking them to fund "infrastructure" directly, we can show them our consistent track record: "when you fund Tor things, it always ends up benefiting a much larger ecosystem.")
--Roger