This week on the Tor e-mail list, Roger Dingledine, the project leader for the well-known online anonymity tool, pointed out that the “number of Tor clients running appears to have doubled since August 19.”

The above graph shows that in less than one week, the number of Tor users has shot up to about 1.2 million from 600,000.

“And it's not just a fluke in the metrics data—it appears that there really are twice as many Tor clients running as before,” Dingledine wrote on Tuesday. “There's a slight increase (worsening) in the performance measurements, but it's hard to say if that's a real difference. So while there are a bunch of new Tor clients running, it would seem they're not doing much. Anybody know details? It's easy to speculate (Pirate Browser publicity gone overboard? People finally reading about the NSA thing? Botnet?), but some good solid facts would sure be useful.”

In the wake of the Edward Snowden news and the National Security Agency revelations, I’ve definitely increased my use of VPNs, PGP (here’s my key!), and Tor. Perhaps I'm not alone.

Others on the Tor list have suggested that it’s a spike from Russia as a result of a newly passed “anti-piracy” law. Anyone have any better ideas?