Traffic Studies Reveal Complex Picture of Tor’s Role on ‘Dark Web’

For a week in March, Website security firm CloudFlare analyzed the traffic hitting its customers’ sites from the anonymous Tor Network.

The results of the study illustrate the double-edged nature of online anonymity. The Tor Network—a peer-to-peer collection of volunteered servers linked together to create an anonymizing Web service—allows people in oppressive countries to surf the Internet, enables activists to communicate freely and helps journalists evade government surveillance.