CIA launches its official anonymous onion site over the Tor network, where people can apply for jobs and for reporting information.

Onion websites can be reachable only via the Tor network, and search engines do not index these sites. They operate under the under layered proxy networks.

By installing the Tor Browser, you can access the dark web hosting websites. The Dark Web, on the other hand, is defined as “the portion of the Internet that is intentionally hidden from search engines, uses masked IP addresses, and is accessible only with a specific web browser.

Tor browser ensures your communication around a distributed system of transfers keeps running by volunteers all around the globe.

It prevents some person viewing your Internet connection from realizing what websites you visit, it prevents the websites you visit from learning your physical location, and it gives you a chance to get to websites which are blocked.

CIA believes it’s a move to Onion Site offers “Secure, anonymous, untraceable—traits ever-present in CIA’s intelligence collection mission,” reads CIA press release.

“Our global mission demands that individuals can access us securely from anywhere. Creating an onion site is just one of many ways we’re going where people are,” said Brittany Bramell, CIA’s Director of Public Affairs.

The dark website site is the mirror link of www.cia.gov, “The World Factbook to reporting information to apply for a job, is available on our onion site.”

ciadotgov4sjwlzihbbgxnqg3xiyrg7so2r2o3lt5wz5ypk4sxyjstad.onion

source

The CIA has recently been expanding its online communication with the public, and now it’s taking that effort to the deepest corners of the internet.

The agency launched a website Tuesday on the Tor network — the backbone of what’s commonly known as the dark web — to give people a new and more secure way to get in contact.

“Our global mission demands that individuals can access us securely from anywhere. Creating an onion site is just one of many ways we’re going where people are,” Brittany Bramell, CIA’s director of public affairs, said in a statement. The dark web isn’t indexed or searchable by normal search engines, and to access it, individuals must use an anonymized browser called Tor — short for The Onion Router.

The CIA’s .onion site will provide all of the same information, contacts and services the spy agency’s normal website does. It’s aimed at people who want to anonymously share information with the CIA, but are wary of being tracked.

“We believe onion services are a key next step in securing the web, similar to the standardization of https as more secure configuration than http, so it’s not a surprise that the CIA would want to take advantage of the privacy and security protections that onion services provide,” said Stephanie Whited, Tor’s communications director.

Spy agencies have long been at home on the dark web, as Tor was developed with U.S. intelligence in mind by the Naval Research Lab “for the primary purpose of protecting government communications.” But now it’s used by a much wider community, from journalists and activists to those buying and selling illicit goods and services.

The CIA gives instructions on downloading Tor and how to reach its dark web domain, which is at the following address:

ciadotgov4sjwlzihbbgxnqg3xiyrg7so2r2o3lt5wz5ypk4sxyjstad.onion

This comes on the heels of the CIA launching an official Instagram account, adding to a social media presence that already consisted of Twitter and Facebook profiles. source

THE ANONYMITY SERVICE Tor has grown in popularity around the world over the past few years, but it has also long been a tool for intelligence agencies and clandestine communications—not to mention endless cat-and-mouse games between law enforcement and criminals. But now, the CIA is staking out a more public presence there.

On Tuesday, the CIA announced its own Tor “onion service,” so that people around the world can browse the agency’s website anonymously—or, you know, send history-altering tips. Tor is an anonymity network that you access through a special browser, like the Tor Browser, and that uses its own URLs. The service protects your IP address and browsing online by encrypting the traffic and bouncing it around a series of waypoints to make it very difficult to trace.

Over the years, several organizations have made so-called onion sites—a dedicated version of their website that they configure and host to be accessible through the Tor anonymity network. Also called an onion service, Facebook launched one in 2014, and The New York Times added one in 2017. The National Police of the Netherlands even has an onion service related to its dark-web criminal takedown operations. But the CIA is the first intelligence agency to make the leap.

“Our global mission demands that individuals can access us securely from anywhere,” CIA director of public affairs Brittany Bramell told WIRED ahead of the launch in a statement. “Creating an onion site is just one of many ways we’re going where people are.”

Everything from the CIA’s main website is available on its onion site, including instructions for how to contact the CIA and a digital form for submitting tips. There are also job listings, the agency’s archival material including its World Factbook and, of course, the Kids’ Zone. The main reasons to actually access the CIA’s site through Tor seem to be sending information to the agency with more robust anonymity protection or quietly applying for a job there.

The CIA’s site is a Version 3 onion service, meaning it has the improved cryptographic algorithms and stronger authentication the Tor Project launched at the end of 2017. In general, it works the same as Version 2 onion sites except it has a longer address. Instead of something like “nytimes3xbfgragh.onion,” you reach the CIA’s onion site at “ciadotgov4sjwlzihbbgxnqg3xiyrg7so2r2o3lt5wz5ypk4sxyjstad.onion.”

Tor was largely created through funding from the United States government in the 1990s and early 2000s, including from the Naval Research Lab and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. The anonymity service has been open source since its public release in 2002, and it transitioned to being overseen by a nonprofit, dubbed the Tor Project, in 2006.

“We make free and open source software that’s available for anyone to use—and that includes the CIA,” says Stephanie Whited, communications director for the Tor Project. “We don’t choose who uses our software. We want to see onion services adopted more frequently, and we think there’s a trend moving in that direction.”

The CIA could have ulterior motives for establishing an onion site, but perhaps the agency is in fact simply trying to offer more ways for people to contact it and interact with its public resources. If nothing else, the project’s tagline pokes fun at its inherent ambiguity: “Onions have layers, so do we.” source

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