Over the last three months, we have:

# Launched election internet freedom monitoring project

This year, with more than 65 elections happening around the world, Internet freedom may be at risk. Some organizations have called it the Year of Democracy. Simultaneously, there is a rising concern that during these many electoral processes, governments in certain parts of the world will block access to the Internet in their countries. Governments may also censor media outlets, persecute and harass journalists, and block social media platforms and messaging apps.

In this context, the Tor Project has developed a project to monitor global elections, detect Internet censorship taking place during these elections, support Internet users so they can bypass this censorship by using Tor, and document these incidents.

So far, we’ve monitored elections in Pakistan, Belarus, and Russia.

* Belarus: No new internet censorship detected during the election

* Pakistan: Site blocking, full internet outages, and blocking of VPNs detected

* Russia: No new internet censorship detected during the election

[→ Read more about defending internet freedom in 2024](https://blog.torproject.org/2024-defend-internet-freedom-during-elections/)

# Introduced Webtunnel, a new type of censorship circumvention mechanism

![introducing Webtunnel](https://blog.torproject.org/introducing-webtunnel-evading-censorship-by-hiding-in-plain-sight/lead.webp)

We celebrated the World Day Against Cyber Censorship by officially announcing WebTunnel, a new type of Tor bridge designed to assist users in heavily censored regions to connect to the Tor network. Available now in the stable version of Tor.

The development of different types of bridges are crucial for making Tor more resilient against censorship and stay ahead of adversaries in the highly dynamic and ever-changing censorship landscape. This is especially true as we’re going through the 2024 global election megacycle.

WebTunnel is a censorship-resistant [pluggable transport](https://support.torproject.org/glossary/pluggable-transports/) designed to mimic encrypted web traffic (HTTPS) inspired by HTTPT. It works by wrapping the payload connection into a WebSocket-like HTTPS connection, appearing to network observers as an ordinary HTTPS (WebSocket) connection. So, for an onlooker without the knowledge of the hidden path, it just looks like a regular HTTP connection to a webpage server giving the impression that the user is simply browsing the web.

[→ Read more about how Webtunnel empowers censorship circumvention](https://blog.torproject.org/introducing-webtunnel-evading-censorship-by-hiding-in-plain-sight/)

# Launched Tor Postbox, a testimony hub featuring stories from Tor users worldwide!

![launched Postbox](https://blog.torproject.org/support-tor-project-share-your-story/lead.webp)

[Tor Postbox](https://community.torproject.org/outreach/stories/) is a collection of anonymous user stories submitted by people who rely on Tor to protect their privacy and anonymity. We designed this resource to support individuals and organizations who are advocating to defend encryption and privacy-enhancing technology, as well as to better demonstrate Tor’s impact.

We encourage you to share their experiences with your network, friends and family, or as part of your work to promote the use of privacy-preserving technologies like Tor and help us defend strong online protections.

Here’s one example of the stories on the Postbox hub:

> **Encryption is privacy, as simple as that. Privacy should be the default, giving away information should be the exception. We should never wonder “do I have something to hide, do I have a reason to not give this information?” This way of thinking is extremely unhealthy. The only real question we should ask ourselves is “do I have a good reason to share this personal information?”**

You can watch the Tor Postbox launch event, here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-K8ki7zBArs, in this video you will hear from digital rights advocates, journalists and other online privacy experts as they share insights on outreach, advocacy, challenges in 2024, and their vision for the future of digital rights.

# Recent releases

* [Tor 0.4.8.11](https://forum.torproject.org/t/stable-release-0-4-8-11/12265) (April 10) - This is a minor release mostly to upgrade the fallbackdir list. Worth noting also that directory authority running this version will now automatically reject relays running the end of life 0.4.7.x version.

* [Arti 1.2.1](https://blog.torproject.org/arti_1_2_1_released/) (April 2) - Arti is our ongoing project to create a next-generation Tor client in Rust. This release continues development on onion services, and adds several important security features. More such improvements are on the way. 

* [Tor Browser 13.0.13](https://blog.torproject.org/new-release-tor-browser-13013/) (March 22) - This is an unscheduled emergency release with important security updates to Firefox for Desktop platforms. Android is unaffected.