What is the Tor network? The anonymous internet, explained [Video]

The Tor network was created in the early 2000s as a project at the Naval Research Laboratory, a research institute of the U.S. Army. Since 2006, the independent non-profit organization The Tor Project has been responsible for the operation and further development of the network. The aim of the organization is to provide a free option for anonymizing connection data on the internet. The Tor Project receives around 85 percent of its funding from several U.S. authorities, with the remaining 15 percent coming from private sponsors and non-governmental organizations.

Tor originally stood for “The Onion Router”: Anyone who dials into the network is routed through three randomly selected Tor servers, which lie one behind the other like the skins of an onion and are known as nodes. The website visited therefore only ever sees the IP address of one Tor server, the so-called exit server. The visitor’s address remains hidden. …