Even before Edward Snowden’s revelations, many people suspected that spooks like those at America’s National Security Agency could pry into their electronic lives. Most were not worried enough to do anything about it. But political dissidents in authoritarian countries, and a hypervigiliant few in the West, have long tried to outwit the NSA and its counterparts in other countries. One favourite tool is The Onion Router, or TOR, a system which disguises the provenance of communications by rerouting them cleverly around the web. The New Yorker, among other media firms, uses TOR to help whistleblowers submit information anonymously.

But TOR is not perfect. Careful analysis of message timing, or the sort of traffic analysis made possible by the NSA’s enormous dragnet, may allow the spooks to penetrate the fog and pin down a user’s identity, even if they cannot read the messages themselves. Indeed, rumours have long swirled that the intelligence agencies run TOR nodes of their own, the better to keep tabs on its users. Happily, more help for the security-conscious whistleblower may now be at hand, in the form of AdLeaks, a system proposed by Völker Roth of the Free University in Berlin, in a paper posted to the […]