There are few encryption technologies that can match Tor and such is its supremacy that the Russian government is offering £65,000 to anyone who can find a way to track its users. In the US the National Security Agency (NSA) labelled Tor 'the King' of internet anonymity, while notorious whistle-blower Edward Snowden used it to send thousands of top secret government files to The Guardian and Washington Post newspapers. Look up your IP address when using Tor and you'll get an idea of how it works – one second you'll be in Bucharest, then Hamburg and then New York. Each hop also uses a separate set of encryption keys while Tor changes the route it sends you on every ten minutes to stop any patterns from emerging. Each relay your connection passes through is unconnected to the last, so there's no way of tracing your hop-scotch through the relays. The seemingly random nature of Tor connections is the network's greatest strength. Tor uses thousands of relays around the globe to hide your connection, taking a random path and erasing its footprints to throw spooks off your trail. Like an onion Tor is made up of layers and the more layers your traffic passes through the harder you are to track. This is both the special software that is installed on your computer and the network that handles Tor connections.

The name Tor was originally an acronym for The Onion Router. But now it is being dragged kicking and screaming into the spotlight, putting online anonymity at risk. This hidden network is forever scurrying beneath the surface of the public internet, away from the prying eyes of governments and Google. Tor also forms part of the deep web, used by criminals to peddle drugs, weapons and images of child sexual abuse. Tor routes connections through thousands of relays across the world to hide who you are, where you are and what you're doing. To do this people turn to Tor, the world's most notorious anonymity tool. People living under repressive regimes, political activists, spies, journalists and even the military all need to access the internet and remain truly anonymous and impossible to track. While these intrusions on your freedom and privacy may seem benign, for many anonymity is a matter of life and death. Private companies and governments track everything you do online.

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