Earlier this year, I was asked about the connection between digital rights to human rights. I responded with my own questions. Today, I'm asking you those same questions:

When was the last time you learned about a police or military force harming a community? Where did you learn that information? When was the last time you saw hundreds of thousands of people on the street, calling for legislative change? Where did you see those pictures? How did those people learn about that protest and decide to join it?

In these examples, information is passed around with the help of the internet. Anybody fighting for human rights today is using technology: to share flyers or photos on social media, to communicate with a group on a messaging app, or to send messages to their representatives via email.

The upside is that technology makes the fight for human rights possible on a more global scale, because we can see and connect our movements together; however, most tech that we use today is controlled by Big Tech. That often means companies are conducting surveillance of how you use that technology and controlling the information you are shown through straight up censorship, algorithm manipulation, and shadow banning. As if that weren’t enough, there are many governments out there exploring and developing technology to repress and censor people.

There’s no democracy without digital rights

That is the connection between digital rights and human rights: You cannot untangle the fight to exercise our rights in the modern world from the internet and technology. Once you see that all movements for change depend, on some level, on technology, you can also see that the fight to defend democracies worldwide is equally connected to digital rights. In 2025 that has become clearer than ever.

From now on, there can be no defense of democracy where technology is not part of the conversation. This year we’ve heard a lot about “tech sovereignty” and the importance of breaking out from the dependency on Big Tech and centralization of services by one country. But tech sovereignty alone won’t save us if we don’t make digital rights a part of this plan. Otherwise, tech sovereignty can easily become authoritarian tech sovereignty, with each country creating its own walled-off internet, like Russia and China have been pushing for their citizens.

There are no digital rights without your support

2025 was also a year where projects working on digital rights faced unprecedented financial challenges. Many digital rights projects lost their backing.

Think about it: we are in a moment in the world where democracies are fragile, where resistance and the fight to protect democracy and human rights are incredibly important. And we are living a moment where it is almost impossible to do these things without the use of technology. At this crucial moment for the world, the main projects that are providing protection and tools for this resistance, are underfunded.

This fight to secure a better future for the world needs to include the support for projects working on digital rights.

So I am calling on our community to come together in 2026 and support these projects. Not only the Tor Project, but all of the projects that are working to build tools that ensure your rights are protected in the digital world. So you can help the fight for our rights in the “offline” world.

Tor's part in upholding our digital rights in 2026

Rights are upheld by people, communities, and technologies that adapt to a changing world. Here's what that looks like for Tor as we head into the next year.

We're continuing with a clear vision: make it easier for people to exercise their right to privacy and access to information with tools that keep us connected, and make it harder for powerful adversaries to break that connection.

In practice, this means refining how we respond to censorship events in real time: rolling out new features like Conjure and experimenting with new pluggable transports, and integrating effective circumvention tools into more Tor software like Tails and Tor VPN. At the same time, we're expanding the capabilities of battle-tested options that people can rely on when conditions change. We're working on a more efficient transport mode for Snowflake, so users can still reach it even as censors adapt, and we're making WebTunnel even more powerful, so it works in more environments where other circumvention tools struggle.

We'll also double down on keeping the Tor network safe against evolving attacks. One priority is implementing Counter Galois Onion (CGO), a new cryptographic defense designed to mitigate attacks on the Tor network, into onion services, alongside other initiatives to counter abuses of Tor technology.

Finally, we'll continue our work to make onion services more widely accessible, so publishing information in anonymous and secure ways, and reaching people in censored regions, becomes easier. Privacy-preserving technology has to be usable by the millions of internet users who depend on it for their protection. Ensuring their ease-of-use and continued availability is one of the most powerful ways we can defend digital rights human rights in 2026.