Andrew Lewman is the Executive Director of The Tor Project and a trained Biologist with specialization in Ethology and Biochemistry. He is also on the Board of the Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium, which brings together anonymity and privacy experts from around the world to discuss recent advances and new perspectives in privacy for the Internet and other communication networks. In addition he is working to help eliminate Domestic Violence, Intimate Partner Violence (IPV), and Intimate Partner Abuse (IPA) through the use of information technology, resources, biotechnology, and experience.

“I’m a strong believer of individual rights, privacy, anonymity, and solving real-world problems; sometimes even with technology. I’ve been interviewed by the global press about these topics. Sometimes, I even write code.”

Tor is a free software that enables online anonymityand censorship resistance. The router directs Internet traffic through a free, worldwide, volunteer network, consisting of more than five thousand relays to conceal a user’s location or usage from anyone conducting network surveillance or traffic analysis. Using Tor makes it more difficult to trace Internet activity, including “visits to Web sites, online posts, instant messages, and other communication forms”, back to the user[6] and is intended to protect the personal privacy of users, as well as their freedom and ability to conduct confidential business by keeping their internet activities from being monitored. Tor encrypts the original data, including the destination IP address, multiple times and sends it through a virtual circuit comprising successive, randomly selected Tor relays. Each relay decrypts a layer of encryption to reveal only the next relay in the circuit in order to pass the remaining encrypted data on to it. The final relay decrypts the innermost layer of encryption and sends the original data to its destination without revealing, or even knowing, the source IP address.

Related links

• Andrew Lewman’s wiki
• The Tor Project