# 20 years of the Tor Project | Isabela Fernandes [Tor] - Speakers: [Isabela Fernandes](https://streameth.org/speakers/isabela-fernandes) - Channel: [Ethereum Cypherpunk Congress](https://streameth.org/ethereum-cypherpunk-congress) - Date: 2026-07-09 - Duration: 17:36 - Topics: web3, privacy, now, crypto, cryptography, blockchain, data, security, human right, rights, tech, technology, internet, open source, free, freedom, ethereum, hackers, ethics, cypherpunk, dev, developer, dapp, decentralization, bitcoin, computer, surveillance, cyber, peer2peer, p2p, love, solidity, zk, zero knowledge, education, academy, w3pn, neo, summit, berlin, neocypherpunk - Watch: https://streameth.org/watch/yt-DjXUorBxFbk - YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DjXUorBxFbk ## Description 20 years of the Tor Project: How an anonymity tool became public interest infrastructure Isabela Fernandes [Tor Executive Director] When Tor was founded in 2006, its mission sounded almost utopian: to advance human rights and freedoms by creating and deploying free, open-source anonymity and privacy technologies. Two decades later, the mission hasn't changed — but the world has. Internet shutdowns and systemic censorship affected more than half the world's population in 2025, as governments tighten their grip on the technology people rely on for a free, open internet. Wikipedia In this talk, Isabela Fernandes, Executive Director since 2018, traces how a tool built by volunteers became civic infrastructure, relied on by everyone from human rights advocates bypassing surveillance and censorship to ordinary people just accessing the open web — all while staying true to a model built on collaboration and community rather than competition. She'll also look ahead: as shutdowns and censorship escalate globally, what does it take to keep anonymity infrastructure resilient, funded, and recognized not as a luxury, but as a public good. Speaker Isabela Fernandes — Tor Project https://www.torproject.org/ Follow Web3Privacy Now: 🌐 https://new.web3privacy.info 𝕏 https://x.com/web3privacy 🦋 https://bsky.app/profile/web3privacy.info 📸 https://www.instagram.com/web3privacy_now/ 🎤 Neocypherpunk Summit: https://s26ber.web3privacy.info/ Subscribe for more talks on privacy, cryptography, digital rights, decentralized infrastructure, and the future of the open web. ## Transcript Hi everybody. Um, thank you for the invitation. First, I want to thank all the organizers. It's fantastic when you can go to an event and you don't need to pay to come in and it's free knowledge, right? So thank you everybody who's putting a lot of hard work on it. Um I'm going to be talking a little bit of um telling you a story right like 20 years of tour and but before going to how an anonymity to became a public interest infrastructure I want to talk a little bit about before tour and a disclaimer is that the version of this story is mine if you ask any other tour person they probably have a different version so that's the beauty right like of people telling stories and uh I want to go back to in the late 90s early 2000 I was part of this project I don't know if a lot of people here heard of in the media independent media center but there was many of these websites around here in Europe as well and I think this shows a little bit of the culture before tour because this was uh free software right like basic CMS that anyone could publish their story and they didn't need to have a username or password and they could give whatever name they wanted they could be anonymous as they were publishing the story and we were hosting these websites. We were not logging anyone's IP address especially because we knew people would go after those who would publish the story. We had many requests to find out who published certain story in the website and because we didn't have IP addresses we couldn't give them. Um another thing that was very important for us is where we would host where our servers were. So we had like community owner uh collocation projects that we puted our service there and we were hosting it because we wanted to make sure that any like a law enforcement request would come to us directly so we could fight it and um yeah and protect that news right like it was a project to give voice to the voiceless and this is started in the early times of the internet and was very powerful um and at some point in a meeting I'm talking about 2001 in San Francisco, people from all around the world came together and were like, "Okay, this is getting big. We need to officialize like what is the principles of unity of this global network." And we were having this conversation and there was a group on the side, you know, like in the garden that we're talking we need to also build the infrastructure like a parallel internet or something. This was a project called Freenet at the time and that was like almost 27 well 25 years ago. And then Tori is deployed a few years after right in 2002 was the first uh deployment of the onion roing and the nonprofit was formed in 2006 uh to give it some sustainability stability for the project. The first things that came with to um people might remember Vidalia but after Vidalia at some point to created a browser a fork of Firefox because it was not sufficient to just care uh for the protection of privacy on the wire right like on the network also on the client side was extremely important. Uh there was a lot of data being leaked by browser. So we start to build our own browser to also make it easier for the user to connect to tour. Another powerful piece of this infrastructure are onion servers. The only addresses that works only inside of the to network and you can think of okay I only addresses for me to access a hidden website but it's way more than that. Nowadays there are multiple applications on builded on the top of this only addresses and they even like security layers for networks and so on. And this was the right like the tools right like the sat the kids or whatever the infrastructure that was being created and was emerging. I think there was a moment that there's two moments that people realize that the power of Thor the power of this infrastructure I think one of these moments was when Wikileaks decide to use this infrastructure for journalism to talk with sources in an anonymous way to protect the sources and to publish their stories. When people saw that setup that they put together, a lot of other news agencies was like, "Oh, this is important. I should be doing this." And it kind of like was a boom or a mind-blowing like moment for journalists around the world. And another moment was the Arab Spring in 2010 and 11 because at that moment we saw that censorship is surveillance were really affecting the people who were rising up against author uh authoritarian regimes and was adopted and was used by activists, journalists and everybody who was just protesting on the street. So I think like those two moments market that this infrastructure were powerful, was needed and had multiple use cases and that around this time and people might remember 2008, 2010, 111, right? Like the surveillance capitalism debate was growing. A lot of people were really uh upset on the fact of the mass data collection that was being uh that was happening the lack of power of uh controlling your data right like there was a lot of debates around that regulation around that and then this guy show up and this guy show up and to tell us that like listen it's not just about big tech collecting your data is bigger than that right like there are government using this to monitor people there's a mass surveillance system and uh he spoke a lot about tour as well right like he said like use store who's signal he also mentioned u a little bit about his own use it of tour and how that was important how tales was important and after that we saw a big growth in our community this is the this graphic shows uh the number of relays on the tour network and you can see the spike is starting right on 2013 right like a lot of people start to help to our project to help the network and to run um relays we also saw a big increase on our user base we don't track users so this is like the average number of connection to the network every hour so but we saw it growing from 1 million to around 5 million after that and also we saw the ecosystem of tools growing for instance on share is a file sharing uh tool application that uh you drop your file automatically create our own address and the other person can download it. There is no cloud servers or anything and this tool actually was created because of Snowden for the journalist to talk with Snowden and then we became a popular like a open tool for anyone to use. We also uh start to go to mobile importance of mobile with to browser for Android onion browser but other applications like ricochet and quiet which are chat applications they start to emerge. So this is anonymous chat application where every user is Ionian service Ionia address very interesting thing too. Um and then security drop and global leaks those are whistleblower tools that uh different uh news agency you're probably familiar with then uh exist. So the community is start to grow on all the aspects right and um we also had to grow the organization right like uh people have been talking here during the day about sustainability how we can uh be resilient and this takes a lot and takes people. So right right now today we are around 60 people in 14 countries. Uh we also start to better organize the or the structure of the organization. Uh the network team in the past when I joined our back in 2015 they used to do everything. They were the ones building the network. They were the ones building uh circumvention tools for the network. They was the one taking care of the network. And now we actually have teams that specialize on these areas. We have the anti censorship team. We have the network health team that monitor bad relays in the network. Uh and like I said, we have grown on different fronts of the community on the relay operators. We have grown also uh the tools but also we have gone on the community of trainers. It's actually very important to have people who knows and these tools and can teach other people as well. uh this community of trainers is a work that we've been doing for a decade now. We are mainly focused on the global south. So we partner with organizations in the global south uh human rights organizations, independent media organizations and we teach them and we cultivate this relationship over time where we keep them up to date with the technology new features. We are able to give them money to organize the trainings and now we start to a phase where we can actually pay for fellowships on as part of this project. But where are we today right like uh the internet freedom have declined for the past for 15 years consecutive but that doesn't mean that the battle right like we have lost the battle right like the battle continued and I think the even though with this fact that the internet freedom have declined for 15 years consecutive that is one fact that keeps people enables people to be able to connect online to be anonymous and to have the private acy which is this community and the c creative c creativity of this community. Um I want to give a couple of examples. This is a really cool one is snowflake. So snowflake is one of the circumvention tools. Torque can also be censored and people need an alternative way to connect to the network and we have this alternative way that work in certain areas. But the problem was we had to pay for the bandwidth and we are nonprofit so we had to keep that cost like the cap of 2,000 a month. That was what we could afford and that made it super slow for users to connect. So we need a solution where we could have high level high bandwidth in a lower cost and that's where snowflake came. Snowflake is a proxy uh pool where anyone here can become a proxy and the cool thing about it is that you don't need to know how to code. You don't need to know how to run a server. All you do is that you install a web extension on your browser on Firefox or Chrome and automatically you are donating your bandwidth to this pool. Uh, and I think this is a really amazing project because when you lower the curve, right, like at the technical knowledge curve for people to cooperate, you can see that everybody wants to help. While we have around 7,000 servers on the tour network, we have 130,000 people running this snowflake extension. uh a few years ago at the bureau of war is a woman's uprising movement in Iran. We this snowflake was working really well for Iranians to connect to the internet and everybody was in this movement to get people to support it. We have from influencers up to this this is a really cool photo. This protest is actually here in Berlin and someone make a PL card saying run snowflake to help people in Iran. So this was a movement right like was people all around saying it's easy you can support and we got 130,000 people uh helping with it. Another example I want to share. We did a a user research. We normally run those like through our browser. We put it there anonymously for people to share with us. And here you have the like the new the occasional and the daily uh users. And most of them is start using tor through mobile. That's where they initiate. Um and you can see that mobile versus desktop is quite like mobile is catching up with it. So it was very important for us to start this new project. Last year we launched the tour VPN beta. Uh this VPN has some really cool feedback from the community. One, they love the UI. We spend a lot of time researching the user experience and making sure that was going to be something easier for people to use. Another thing that when we launched it, we were asking people to use it and test it. A lot of folks came to us, especially in the global south, and asked it, is it free? And it was like yes, you don't need to pay to use this VPN. Um and one cool thing which is less about the UI but more about the back end is that this VPN is already integrated with RT. We are rewriting tour in rush and we have done the client side and now you're working on the relay side. So he's already using some components of RT including one called it onion mask which is an API to make it easier for you to build uh tools that runs with tour on mobile. And what on your mask does here is that you one you can select on your VPN which tools you want to route through to but for each application it will create a new to circuit. So all these applications they are not sharing the same to secret. Each one has a to secret and this is another feature that improves the security of uh the tour VPN uh for the user. So this is a two creative projects and I want to go into the reasons to use. We also collect the stories anonymous users and this is a user from here from Europe and I'm not from here. I'm from Brazil and uh every time I come to Europe to talk about tour, I always get people maybe not this crowd but I always get people saying why I would need to in like here in Europe and I think this user gives two stories two reasons that are very important. One you might think that you don't need it but you might be connected and talking with people who needs this protection. So if you are using this tool, you also supporting others, you're caring for others. So that's a good reason. Uh and second, I think we have seen the global context, right? Like maybe someone from the US 10 years ago would say I don't need to and nowadays they might be thinking differently about that. uh the political context can shift and some things that today is normal is your right and it's part of something that you share your opinion freely tomorrow can be different uh in the US we have multiple examples women reproductive rights is one of them and uh context can change any time so I think that um it's important to know these tools so when is needed you know how to use it you're already familiar with it. Uh so done with that, let's celebrate, right? Like it's about 20 years of the tour project. It's a moment of celebration. I love like to celebrate with all of you this moment. I think everybody here who are part of this community. Even if you just walk in the street and saw this event and walk in to check it out, you are part of this. you were part of the success stories like I'm sharing today of tour but all the projects that have been sharing here all day long and u I want to say that this projects need to your help right now the tour project is running we're funding the coms a fundraising um uh pro a fundraising campaign uh you might have heard that a lot of these projects lost funding there's a funding crisis in the ecosystem So here you see a bunch of them like onion shared uni secure drop some of the ecosystem tools that I spoke earlier that was builded on the top of tour or are related to to related to the internet freedom project. Uh I would invite you to go to internetfreedom.tor.org org and maybe make a donation and support this system this uh applications. We are this whole fundraising is all with cryptocurrency. So Zcash, Bitcoin, Ethereum, all of them. You can go and check it out and maybe you can support it. Thank you.