The government's campaign for online censorship has created a backlash, with the number of Russia-based users of anonymous web surfing software Tor more than doubling in the past three weeks. The Tor network, which allows users to anonymously visit websites blocked in their country, numbered almost 200,000 users from Russia on Wednesday, compared to some 80,000 as of June 1, according to official statistics for Tor usage on Torproject.org.

If you want to use the internet and you don't want the National Security Agency to see what you're doing, you would likely turn to Tor, a network that anonymizes web traffic by bouncing it between servers. The NSA has been working on ways to get around " the Tor problem" for years with limited success.

AS THE Iraqi government censors large swathes of the internet following devastating attacks and victories by the militant group Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), thousands of people are turning to the deep, anonymous web. Locals are adopting the browser Tor, the most popular anonymising tool online, to get around government obstruction, the Daily Dot reported.

Most mainstream media coverage has derided the Deep Web as a hub of child pornography and hitmen for hire. But though there may be depraved activities facilitated by the underground network, there are also many upstanding individuals using marketplaces like the Silk Road to ease the pain of unjust laws and otherwise do good.

One year after the first revelations of Edward Snowden, cryptography has shifted from an obscure branch of computer science to an almost mainstream notion: It's possible, user privacy groups and a growing industry of crypto-focused companies tell us, to encrypt everything from emails to IMs to a gif of a motorcycle jumping over a plane.

In the year since Edward Snowden's leaks lifted the veil on the National Security Agency's massive global surveillance apparatus, the powerful online anonymity tool known as Tor has been downloaded about 120 million times, according to Andrew Lewman, the Tor project's executive director.

Tor is not a silver bullet, but as we become more aware of the types of ongoing government and corporate surveillance of our online lives, it remains a vital tool. This was the message delivered by Runa Sandvik, a contributor to the open source Tor Project, at Kaspersky Lab's open day.