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The question he didn't even know to ask is, "What are safe and secure computing and online practices?"

how to think about adversaries online, what is ssl, what it means, what are phishing, viruses, botnets, and state-sponsored malware. By the end of the 4th hour, he understood how tor is different than a simple vpn or proxy server, and when to use tor and when it isn't needed. 3.5h of that discussion was basic operational, computer, and online security and safe practices.

Reading the New Yorker’s piece on WikiLeaks, it’s hard to decide whether I’m reading about freedom fighters, skilled propagandists, or as is often the case, both.

The Tor Project blog responds, pointing out that Tor doesn't magically encrypt text, it simply allows for the anonymous transfer of files. So if you use unsecure connections and send data in plain text, it's just as safe as writing down the information on a piece of paper, folding it into an airplane, and throwing it across the street.

Before launching the site, Assange needed to show potential contributors that it was viable. One of the WikiLeaks activists owned a server that was being used as a node for the Tor network. Millions of secret transmissions passed through it. The activist noticed that hackers from China were using the network to gather foreign governments’ information, and began to record this traffic. Only a small fraction has ever been posted on WikiLeaks, but the initial tranche served as the site’s foundation, and Assange was able to say, “We have received over one million documents from thirteen countries.”

I write to remind our users, and people in search of privacy enhancing technology, that good software is just one part of the solution.

We hear from the Wikileaks folks that the premise behind these news articles is actually false -- they didn't bootstrap Wikileaks by monitoring the Tor network.

WikiLeaks, the controversial whistleblowing site that exposes secrets of governments and corporations, bootstrapped itself with a cache of documents obtained through an internet eavesdropping operation by one of its activists, according to a new profile of the organization’s founder. The activist siphoned more than a million documents as they traveled across the internet through Tor, also known as “The Onion Router,” a sophisticated privacy tool that lets users navigate and send documents through the internet anonymously.

The siphoned documents, supposedly stolen by Chinese hackers or spies who were using the Tor network to transmit the data, were the basis for WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange’s assertion in 2006 that his organization had already “received over one million documents from 13 countries” before his site was launched, according to the article in The New Yorker.