The French independent investigative online newspaper Mediapart has now launched a .onion version for the dark web.

According to the Tor Project, the French independent investigative online newspaper Mediapart.fr has joined the growing list of news organizations adopting .onion sites on the Tor network. By leveraging Tor technology, Mediapart ensures its journalism can reach anyone anywhere, unaffected by the political climate.

Readers around the world can now access Mediapart's coverage via the following darknet V3 address:

https://www.mediapartrvj4bsgolbxixw57ru7fh4jqckparke4vs365guu6ho64yd.onion

Protecting Readers, Defending Independent Journalism

Freedom of expression, freedom of information, and press freedom are fundamental rights that Mediapart has upheld through extensive investigative journalism since its founding in 2008. However, in some countries around the world, authorities restrict press freedom, as seen recently with the blocking of European media in Russia. This ultimately prompted Mediapart to launch its onion mirror: Carine Fouteau, the publication's president and publishing editor, stated that it aims to counter such censorship and oppose those "who hate checks and balances."

"Following Emmanuel Macron's dissolution of the French National Assembly in June 2024, the risk of the far right forming a government in France has prompted us to prepare for the worst," Carine continued. "By providing services on the Tor network, we guarantee that our readers can freely access our information regardless of the political climate. We are also thinking of our readers living abroad. Mediapart is a newspaper without borders: our subscribers need to be able to read us securely wherever they live."

Migrating to the Tor Network

Yassine Zouggari, the DevSecOps engineer for the media company, explained the technical process of setting up Onion Services using Onionspray. This tool simplifies the process by setting up HTTPS rewriting proxies between existing websites and Tor users. Onionspray provides an additional protocol layer for accessing public sites. By relying on Onion Service technology, it protects user location information and the website from censorship as long as both the website and the users have access to the Tor network.

Here's a conversation between the Tor Project and Yassine Zouggari:

Tor Project: Why did you decide to launch the .onion site now? Does it address any issues you've encountered?

Yassine Zouggari: One of our main objectives has been to provide a convenient way for our users to securely connect to our website. Launching the Onion Service also enables us to more easily allow legitimate Tor traffic to our site, as using our clearnet website with Tor is sometimes blocked by our own website defenses.

The reason we decided to launch this service at this particular moment was due to the recent European elections and the dissolution of the French parliament. We want to ensure that we have tools in place that make it as easy as possible for our readers to circumvent censorship of our clearnet website, should it occur in the future.

Tor Project: How has your experience been with Onionspray? Do you find it user-friendly?

Yassine Zouggari: Onionspray made it straightforward for us to deploy the .onion domain without much effort. We had a basic version working pretty much out-of-the-box, with very minimal setup to make it work flawlessly. It comes equipped with all the necessary tools and configurations, and the documentation is very precise and helpful.

The bulk of the work has been: 1) adjusting our security measures to rate-limit requests per-user if coming through our Onionspray proxy, so that one brute-forcer does not impact the whole Onion Service; and 2) making Onionspray easier to deploy in our infrastructure as code (IaC) context. To make such deployment easier for others, we have open-sourced our Ansible role, which handles the full setup.

Tor Project: Overall, how long did it take to set up the Onion Service? Do you think this is a worthwhile investment for other websites and news organizations?

Yassine Zouggari: All in all, the technical setup took about a week for one engineer. We also hope that our contributed Ansible role will significantly speed up this process for others, especially for other organizations with similar requirements to ours.

I believe this is a worthwhile investment: Ensuring that people around the world have access to trustworthy news sources is paramount, regardless of the political context and what might be allowed in their country. The more people use Tor, the more effective it is at providing anonymous traffic. Setting up Onion Services can promote the use of Tor and thus will help combat mass surveillance.