UNPEELING THE ONION BROWSER

Discover how you can mask your web browsing and how governments track you, with a little help from Neil Mohr.

- Neil Mohr

Take a look at how much privacy protection Tor and HTTPS offer when used together. Without these at every step in the process, anybody with access can snoop on all your activity, including the destination site, your username and password, user data, and location.

Using HTTPS protects user data, usernames, and also passwords at all stages.

Using Tor masks your destination site, username and password, data, and, to a certain degree, location. Adding a VPN would further protect your location details, but we should point out that there could be government bodies directly accessing ISP data or the site. com services via unknown snooping programmes.

They’re watching you. They’re watching everything you do online. You’d think we were being paranoid, but it’s part of their mission statement; the international Five Eyes (https:// en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Eyes) is a group made up of Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States, which have worked together since World War II to collate and share intelligence – and that includes internet use by you.

In the digital age, that means intercepting, storing, and analysing all internet traffic. Don’t be fooled into thinking that local laws can stop a nation state from spying on its own citizens. If you’re one of the Five Eyes, just get your mates overseas to do the spying, then report back. Tempora (https:// en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tempora), a UK programme, splices off the undersea fibreoptic backbone of the internet, duplicates all the data transmitted over it. The data is then shared with the USA's NSA. Damn crafty us Brits, described by Edward Snowden as “worse than the US.”