Keeping the Web Private in a Post-NSA World

How you can help keep the world private while doing basically nothing.

By now you certainly have heard all you need to about the NSA, Edward Snowden, and the US Government to know that privacy on the web doesn’t exist. For someone like me who is boring enough to not be a target of any investigation I am not personally worried about my activities online but I do feel that people should have a right to privacy. Especially people that that disagree with the US, or any other government’s political system.

This got me thinking… What could I do to help individuals seeking privacy that doesn’t involve me holding a sign up and marching in the streets?

Then I read this article on The Guardian and this one on The Verge. In short, they outlined the NSA’s difficulty in understanding or tracing the data that goes through TOR’s network.

The TOR network, or The Onion Network is :

[a] free software and an open network that helps you defend against traffic analysis, a form of network surveillance that threatens personal freedom and privacy, confidential business activities and relationships, and state security.

Basically it’s a system of interconnected computers that bounce around data to different servers to make it difficult to trace back to a single user.

I have heard about Tor for years, thought it was cool, but didn’t really have a use for it. While I disagree with some of our government’s decisions I am not really standing up against them any more than the occasional Tweet or Facebook post complaining about it, voting, and the few calls to my Congresspeople.

Then I had an idea: What if I could use this now ubiquitous Raspberry Pi just sitting here on my desk at work doing nothing and put it to use to help support privacy? It’s doing nothing, certainly powerful enough to help relay traffic around the web and we have plenty of bandwidth here at my office. I found a great little write up of how to configure my Pi to do this here.

20 minutes later, voila! I am helping to keep the web private and people with more motivation to communicate securely with each other.

I encourage YOU, small start up businesses with plenty of bandwidth and spare micro-computers like the Raspberry Pi laying around to do the same. It takes 20 minutes of your time, is a cool project to do, and helps the world communicate securely. Here is how I did it: