It has been a rough couple of months for the folks at the Tor Project.
Tor — it stands for "The Onion Router" — camouflages its users' Web communications with encryption and by bouncing signals around server nodes in different parts of the world so that it's all but impossible for either governments or advertisers to track them to their origins. Its fans hail Tor as a vital tool for those who live under repressive governments.
But Tor has suffered a series of public embarrassments — embarrassments that teach important lessons about the increasingly desperate search for online privacy.