During the DEF CON conference, Tor Project co-founder Roger Dingledine attempted to dispel some long-held public misconceptions about the nature of the Tor network and the called dark web.
Dingledine criticized journalists and those who rush, incorrectly as he pointed out, to characterize the Tor network as "a hideout used exclusively by drug dealers and pedophiles to hide from the authorities.".
In fact, he said, only 3% of Tor users connect to hidden services, suggesting that the vast majority of the network’s users use it to browse public websites anonymously, for completely legitimate purposes. In other words, most people – from journalists to activists to other users – use Tor to hide their identities from website owners and are not members of the underworld.
Dingledine even mentioned that the Dark Web – a network of websites hidden within networks like Tor – is quite insignificant in size. The dark web is a relatively small collection of sites that users cannot easily access and that involve criminals, the buying and selling of drugs, weapons, stolen information and child pornography.
“There is no such thing as a dark web. It doesn’t exist,” he told the DEF CON audience. “It’s just a very small number of websites.”
The Tor founder also revealed that the most popular website visited by Tor users is Facebook. In 2014, the social media giant embraced Tor, creating a hidden service as a gateway for the social network.
Now, more than a million people connect to Mark Zuckerberg's empire using the Tor anonymization network. While that's only a small percentage of Facebook's user base, it's still very important for a project like Tor, Dingledine said.
Dingledine also sought to reassure those who fear that intelligence agencies have infiltrated the Tor network, running a large number of Tor relays in an attempt to reveal the identities of Tor users. The Edward Snowden leaks showed that yes, several relays are run by government agencies, Dingledine said, but not many – at least not enough to undermine the integrity of the network.
Dingledine also said that he can vouch for the usability of two-thirds of Tor nodes, and that intelligence agencies do not need to create their own nodes, as they could – if they wanted – monitor users running Tor relays.
