ReadWriteWeb

One year ago today, the slow leak of over 250,000 classified U.S. diplomatic cables from WikiLeaks began. It would be the biggest exposure of such information in recorded history, and the event would trigger both a massive wave of support for the organization and an unprecedented backlash that has included governments, financial institutions and Internet companies.

Today, WikiLeaks is struggling to survive, let alone operate as it once did. A financial blockade has crippled its finances, its founder continues to fight extradition over sexual assault charges and others have defected from the organization entirely. Some of them even launched a competing site for whistleblowers.

It's no exaggeration to say that, sometimes, anonymity is a matter of life and death. Which is why it's important to know just how trivial it is to track down an "anonymous" blogger using their Google Analytics code.

Andy Baio, who runs the popular linkblog Waxy.org posted Wednesday about using simple tools like eWhois and Statsie to unmask several bloggers.

Whether it's to elude oppressive governments or something a bit less noble, many users have a need to browse the Web in complete secrecy. Tools that enable anonymous browsing have existed for years on the desktop and some have popped up for Android. There are some for iOS as well, but until now, none of them featured the bulletproof privacy of the Tor network.

Enter Covert Browser, which was approved by Apple earlier this week. It uses Tor to encrypt Internet traffic and route it through three different servers to ensure data about users cannot be intercepted by third parties. Such data would include browsing history or, more commonly, one's geographic location.

Iran can now track Tor users. Tor users in Iran more than doubled to 2,800 after the 2009 presidential election. Tor, the onion-routing tool that allows users to visit the Internet without betraying what sites they are using, is now traceable by the Iranian security forces. UPI quoted Andrew Lehman, Tor's executive director, as saying the number of Tor users in Iran doubled, to 2,800 after the last election there and the protests that resulted.

The Iranians have employed "deep packet inspection" to follow Web traffic that would not normally be visible. Tor has known it was vulnerable to this type of software but had not yet developed armor against it.

As we've reported, Libya is facing an Internet crack-down similar to the one faced in Egypt earlier this month. As the organization did for Egyptians, French Data Network is offering free dial-up Internet for Libyans. But, if the Internet is offline, how are Libyans supposed to learn how to connect to the Internet? It turns out landlines are still up, so one group is using faxes to pipe information into the country.

The situation in Egypt has colored much of our coverage today, so it's only fitting that we send you into the weekend with some relevant tutorials: an introduction to Ushahidi for developers, tips for optimizing CouchDB and how to create a Tor relay.

As we reported yesterday, the Egyptian government appears to be locking down Intrernet access in Egypt. Access in or out of the country seems to be blocked. GigaOm provides some analysis on how this might work.

However, some Egyptian Internet users are still able to access the outside Internet. The Washington Post lists some ways that Egyptians are still accessing the Internet. Meanwhile, use of Tor, a free Internet anonymizer, is skyrocketing.

Although it's hardly a new technology, recent cyber-skirmishes and demands for better privacy online have put the anonymizing network the Tor Project in the spotlight, including a story earlier this month in The New York Times Magazine, a harbinger perhaps of mainstream adoption. Tor has been around for almost a decade, originally developed by the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory and now used by activists, dissidents, journalists, and well, anyone in order to protect the privacy of online activities.

According to the Tor Project's metrics, the network has had between 100,000 and 300,000 users per day over the course of the past few months.

In times of Internet censorship and governmental interference with citizen Web use, the need for private browsing has never been more apparent or more crucial to political processes.

Perhaps in response to its woes in China, Google has reaffirmed its support of online anonymity for political purposes in a recent blog post on Tor, a project it's been supporting extensively lately. Tor allows for safe, anonymous Internet use - it's a project that protects privacy and circumvents censorship in countries around the world.

Thanks to mobile developer Nathan Freitas and the teams behind Tor and the Guardian Project, secure and anonymous mobile browsing is on its way.

On his blog, Freitas writes, "We have successfully ported the native C Tor app to Android and built an Android application bundle that installs, runs and provides the glue needed to make it useful to end users.... secure, anonymous access to the web via Tor on Android is now a reality."