Snowden-approved: The Citizenfour hackers toolkit

One of the interesting reveals at the end of Citizenfour, the recent Academy Award-winning documentary about Edward Snowden, was the thanks it gives to various security software programs. The information that Snowden leaked two years ago continues to reverberate today, and it kicked off renewed interest in data security, privacy, and anonymity. Based on the closing credits in the movie, weve put together aguide tosome of the major security software programs and operating systems available. If youve wanted to take steps to secure your own information, but were uncertain where to start, this articleshould get you headed in the right direction.

The Tor Security Bundle is probably the best-known of the software products well discuss today. The Tor browser is easy to install and set up; its based on Firefox 31.5.0, but as the program warns, simply using Tor isnt enough to secure your Internet browsing. If you want to remain anonymous on the Tor network, youll need to also do the following:

Configuring Tor is relatively easy. Once youve begun the installation process, youll be asked to choose whether you want to connect directly to Tor or through a bridge relay, as shown below:

Make your choice, and the system finishes installing what looks like a standard version of Firefox with a few custom scripts and configuration options.

One caveat about using Tor for anonymous browsing is that the performance isnt going to be what youre used to from a standard connection. Tor uses multiple levels of encryption to hide destination IPs, and routes the information randomly across its own network to defeat spying. This helps prevent certain kinds of packet tracking, but it also introduces some substantial performance penalties.

The fact that Tor routing is randomized makes it tricky to estimate the performance impact of using it, but we ran a series of webpage loading tests anyway. Treat these as a useful ballpark rather than the final word. Page caches were cleared before the load tests for both standard Firefox (36.0.1) and the Tor Browsers version (31.5.0).

As you can see, load times for Tor are 3-4x higher than they are for other browsers. Thats the price you pay for anonymity.

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Snowden-approved: The Citizenfour hackers toolkit