Ben Collier, Senior Lecturer at the University of Edinburgh and chair of the Foundation for Information Policy Research, joins Plutopia to discuss his MIT Press book Tor: From the Dark Web to the Future of Privacy. The book argues that media overstates Tor’s ties to crime. Originally developed at the U.S. Naval Research Lab as “onion routing,” Tor became practical and popular through the Tor Browser and usability enhancements, while crypto (especially Bitcoin) later enabled illicit markets that grabbed headlines. Ben traces Tor’s unusual early collaboration between military researchers and the cypherpunks. He clarifies that much “dark web” activity is mundane or pro-privacy (e.g., Facebook/BBC onion sites, SecureDrop for journalists), and suggests that most cybercrime now is industrialized “as-a-service” and often sloppy, with law enforcement increasingly operating undercover services and honeypots. He emphasizes Tor’s legitimate uses — censorship circumvention, whistleblowing, secure access to news, and services like Women on Web — and he discusses governance changes at the Tor Project and broader debates over surveillance, encryption, and the trends toward highly centralized platforms and AI. Usability and scale, he argues, are key to real-world privacy; many protections pioneered by Tor and Signal now surface in mainstream tools (e.g., Firefox, WhatsApp). For would-be contributors, he suggests running non-exit relays or funding professional operators, and he closes by stressing that privacy tech can rebalance power by resisting pervasive, automated surveillance.
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