Tor usuage sees dramatic increase

For most of the year, the privacy-enhancing Tor network, which anonymizes internet traffic by routing it through a series of encrypted relays, has had a pretty steady usage of around 500,000 directly connected users for most of the year.

However, in August, the Tor network was seeing more than 1,200,000 users connecting daily. The best guess is the result of all the disclosures about security agencies in the US and UK and their roles in spying on internet traffic.

Around 90,000 Americans were connecting to Tor daily at the start of the month, but that figure grew to around 150,000 daily users by the end. UK daily users grew from around 16,000 to more than 35,000.

As the Tor Project's Roger Dingledine observed on Tuesday, "It's not just a fluke in the metrics data – it appears that there really are twice as many Tor clients running as before."