Guardian Officially Launches Tor Onion Service, Releases Dark Web V3 Domain

The Guardian is a British daily newspaper. It was founded in 1821 as the Manchester Guardian, and changed its name in 1959. Together with its sister newspapers The Observer and The Guardian Weekly, The Guardian is part of the Guardian Media Group, which is owned by the Scott Trust. The Trust was established in 1936 to "ensure the Guardian's financial and editorial independence in perpetuity and to protect the Guardian's freedom of the press and liberal values from commercial or political interference. The Trust was converted to a limited liability company in 2008, and its charter was designed to maintain the same protections for the Guardian as those established by its founders in the Scott Trust structure. Profits are reinvested in journalism rather than distributed to owners or shareholders. It is considered a newspaper of record in the UK.

Tor users can now access the Guardian's "Onion Service" website on the dark web at the following V3 domain address:

https://www.guardian2zotagl6tmjucg3lrhxdk4dw3lhbqnkvvkywawy3oqfoprid.onion

The Tor network helps to hide the location of its users, which makes it more difficult to track their Internet activity. Tor also makes it harder for Internet service providers to identify what their users are accessing. This means that users can bypass censorship in areas of the world where it is difficult to access independent news or where certain sites and services are banned.

Guardian readers have been able to access https://www.theguardian.com using tools such as the Tor Browser. These browsers route their communications through the Tor network - thus hiding the reader's location. But browser traffic must leave the Tor network at the last hop to reach sites on the regular World Wide Web.

The introduction of the Guardian Onion service means that the entire communication path between the reader and the Guardian occurs within the Tor network, thus avoiding the potential risk of "jumping" between the Tor network and the World Wide Web services. An example of this risk might be that the "exit node" - the gateway between the general network and the Tor network - might contain malware or be located somewhere under censorship.

The Guardian's Onion service also promotes anonymity in other ways. The Guardian wants to minimize the digital traces left by reader activity, which can help malicious actors identify them. So users of The Guardian's Onion service will not be able to create a Guardian account or log into their existing account (if they have one), and the site will not contain any third-party advertising or share information with third parties.

The Guardian's Onion service also disables Javascript scripts that normally run in readers' browsers. Some Tor users have disabled JS scripts for security reasons. If they are disabled for all users who visit The Guardian Onion, it wants to ensure that everyone has the same experience and protection. This should also help improve the performance of the Tor network, and its hoped that our modern server-side rendering layer will provide a good user experience on our Onion site. However, some complex interactive content may not work effectively.

Readers who have used Tor Project's Tor Browser to access https://www.theguardian.com should now see a message in their browser's location bar that says ".onion available". This gives readers the option to use the Guardian's onion service.

Since 2014, The Guardian has published the SecureDrop website as an Onion service to allow whistleblowers to be contacted securely. For more information on The Guardian's SecureDrop Onion service, see here.

Visit the Guardian's SecureDrop website on the dark web: http://xp44cagis447k3lpb4wwhcqukix6cgqokbuys24vmxmbzmaq2gjvc2yd.onion

For more information about the Tor network, visit https://www.torproject.org/.