Browse The Intercept Using Our New Tor Onion Service – The Intercept

Websites that end in .onion are known as Tor onion services or if you want to be dramatic about it, the dark web. Heres how it all works.

When you load a website in a normal web browser like Chrome, Firefox, Safari, or Edge, you make a connection over the internet directly from your house (or wherever you happen to be) to the web server youre loading. The website can see where you are coming from (and track you), and your internet service provider can see which website youre loading (and track what youre doing and sell advertising based on your activity).

But if you open Tor Browser and load the same website, none of those parties can spy on you. Even Tor itself wont know what youre up to. Within the network, consisting of thousands of nodes run by volunteers across the internet, you do not connect from your house directly to the web server. Instead, your connection first bounces between three Tor nodes and then finally exits the Tor network and goes to the website. The website cant see where youre coming from, only that youre using Tor. Your ISP cant see what website youre visiting, only that youre using Tor. And the Tor nodes themselves cant fully track you either. The first node can see your home IP address, because you connect directly to it, but cant see what site youre loading, and the last node (also called the exit node) can see what site youre loading but doesnt know your IP address.

In short, Tor Browser makes it so people can load websites anonymously. Tor onion services do the same thing, except for websites themselves.

So what exactly is an onion service? Just like when people use Tor Browser to be anonymous, web servers can use Tor to host anonymous websites as well. Instead of using normal domain names, these websites end with .onion.

If you load an onion site in Tor Browser, both you and the web server bounce encrypted data packets through the Tor network until you complete an anonymous connection, and no one can track anyone involved: Your ISP can only see that youre using Tor, and the websites ISP can only see that its using Tor. You cant learn the websites real IP address, and the website cant learn yours either. And the Tor nodes themselves cant spy on anything. All they can see is that two IP addresses are both using Tor.

Onion services have another cool property: The connection never exits the Tor network, so there are no exit nodes involved. All the communication between Tor Browser and the web server happens in the dark.

When people hear about the dark web, they tend to think about shady things like drug markets and money laundering. That stuff is, in fact, facilitated by anonymous websites running Tor onion services, just as its facilitated by the normal, non-anonymous internet. But its not the only use of onion services by a long shot.

The Intercept along with dozens of other newsrooms around the world, including pretty much every major news organization, run Tor onion sites for SecureDrop, a whistleblower submission platform. With The Intercepts new onion service for readers of our website, well also join the ranks of the New York Times, ProPublica, BuzzFeed News, The Markup, and other news organizations in making their core websites available as onion services.

I also develop an open source tool called OnionShare which makes it simple for anyone to use onion services to share files, set up an anonymous drop box, host a simple website, or launch a temporary chat room.

But, by far, the most popular website on the dark web is Facebook. Yup, Facebook has an onion service. For when you want some but not too much anonymity.

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Browse The Intercept Using Our New Tor Onion Service - The Intercept