“People involved in a project to maintain a secret layer of the internet have turned to Amazon to add bandwidth to the service.

The Tor Project offers a channel for people wanting to route their online communications anonymously.

It has been used by activists to avoid censorship as well as those seeking anonymity for more nefarious reasons.

Use of Amazon’s cloud service will make it harder for governments to track, experts say.

Onion router

Amazon’s cloud service – dubbed EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) offers virtual computer capacity.

The Tor developers are calling on people to sign up to the service in order to run a bridge – a vital point of the secret network through which communications are routed.

“By setting up a bridge, you donate bandwidth to the Tor network and help improve the safety and speed at which users can access the internet,” the Tor project developers said in a blog.”

via BBC News – Secret net Tor asks users to sign up to cloud services.