TOR Browser - Anonymity Online
The Tor Browser Bundle allows users to use the internet anonymously and access banned or blocked websites.

Ahead of this weekend's elections in Turkey, prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has been attempting to close off a number of social media outlets including Twitter and YouTube.

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These sites were blocked after a recording was published anonymously on YouTube which claimed to show a conversation involving Turkey's foreign minister, spy chief, and a top general discussing situations which could lead to a Turkish attack against militants in Syria.

As a result of the Twitter and YouTube blocks, the number of people using Tor, the anonymous web browser, increased exponentially. It was reported earlier this week that more than 10,000 new users in Turkey were accessing the Tor network every day.

Tor, which stands for The Onion Router, is a network which anonymises web traffic allowing users to secretly access online resources and preventing government surveillance.

Tor Block

Erdogan and his colleagues in the Turkish government were clearly monitoring this new trend however and they moved to block access to the official Tor website from within Turkey.

Turkey's internet service providers (ISPs) began blocking the website on Thursday, preventing Turkish citizens from downloading the software - called the Tor Browser Bundle - needed to access the Tor network using a modified web browser.

However, Erdogan is clearly unaware of the multiple mirrors —copies of the website hosted at other locations - which the Tor Project operates, and which are still available to internet users in Turkey.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has it's own mirror here, along with listing some other mirrors:

The EFF does warn however that once the official distribution channel of a security or censorship circumvention tool like Tor is blocked, it leads to a "very real danger" of others taking advantage of the situation.

This could be cybercriminals looking to take advantage of the situation or governments looking to continue to monitor the activity of dissidents.

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