And a new real-time map of that network illustrates just how widespread and global that network has become. 

On Friday, freelance Sydney-based coder Luke Millanta launched Onionview, a web-based project that counts and tracks the geographic location of Tor nodes, the volunteer computers that bounce encrypted traffic around the web to offer Tor users anonymity. His goal, in part, was to show the network's scale and how much it's grown. "People think that Tor is 10 people running computers in their basements," Millanta says. "When people see the map, they say 'Holy shit. That's what 6,000 nodes around the world looks like.'"

Millanta's map also makes it possible to compare which countries host the largest chunks of the Tor network. Despite Tor's origins as a research project at the US Navy and later at MIT, privacy-loving Germany has overtaken the US in total nodes, with France, the Netherlands, and Russia coming close behind.