Jim ThorntonAmerican show host Wheel of Fortunewas involved in a controversy for accessing during a flight to a chat linked to pedophilia. In the photographs released from the episode, he appears using Tor, as identified by the specialized television medium BuzzerBlog.
This browser allows you to access the Internet with additional protections for hide the origin of a connection. Sony Pictures Television confirmed his dismissal on Friday, September 4, after having suspended him while it investigated the allegations. Thornton was the voice of the cycle since 2011.
The episode occurred on May 14, during a flight between Charlotte and Los Angeles, but became public in September, when Sony announced the suspension of the announcer. On September 3, TMZ published the photographs taken by a passenger and, the next day, the company confirmed her dismissal.
His lawyer, Allison Hart, denied that he had committed a crime and maintained that he had arrived at the site because of a confusion with a suicide prevention forum. According to the defense, Thornton was not arrested or formally charged with a crime.
Tor is designed to make it difficult to track internet activity, but that protection doesn’t prevent someone from seeing what appears on a screen. Their tools are designed to make it difficult to track internet activity. This protection has a specific scope: the journey of data through the network. What a user displays on a screen is still exposed to those around them.
What happened on the plane and what Jim Thornton’s defense maintains
American Airlines confirmed that Flight 1276 was met by agents on May 14 at Los Angeles International Airport, after a passenger reported the situation on board. The airline provided that information to Entertainment Weekly.
Photos from the episode were published by TMZ on September 3, while Los Angeles Times coverage described messages of sexual content referring to minors on the screen.
Hart explained that his client was involved in suicide prevention activities since the death of a family member and that an acquaintance had directed him to a forum whose name he mistook for a help resourceto. He stated that he left the page upon understanding its content.
That explanation was questioned in the coverage of the episode, since the BuzzerBlog medium reported that the times of the photographs placed the permanence in the chat at at least 57 minutes. The outlet also identified Tor as the browser open on the computer.
The defense further maintained that the officers spoke with Thornton for five minutes or less and let him go. The claim that authorities determined he had committed no wrongdoing belongs to his lawyer, People reported.
What is Tor and how it protects browsing
Tor Browser is a Firefox-based browser that uses a network of intermediary servers to protect privacy. When you visit a regular website, traffic passes through three servers in the Tor network before reaching its destination. The connection uses layers of encryption that are processed along the way. The site receives the connection from the last server, instead of directly seeing the user’s IP address, the identifier of their connection on the Internet.
The distribution of that route has a specific function. A single intermediary should not know at the same time who initiated the connection and what they are doing. This reduces the information that remains concentrated at each point of the network.
The browser also incorporates anti-tracking measures. By default, it does not retain history after you log out and limits the duration of cookies, small files that sites use to remember visits and preferences. Besides, It seeks to make it difficult to identify a computer based on the characteristics of its browser and configuration.
Tor allows you to visit common pages and access services with addresses ending in .onion, available through its network. The latter can also hide the location of the server that hosts them. Therefore, identifying the browser used is insufficient to determine if a page belongs to the so-called dark web.
Among its applications are the protection of journalistic sources, private communications and access to information in contexts of censorship. The project offers training for journalists, activists and human rights defenders.
The limits of anonymity on the internet
The project itself warns that Tor cannot guarantee perfect anonymity. If a user logs into an account that identifies them or provides their name, email, or phone number, the site can know your identity even if the connection hides your IP address.
Its protection also does not automatically extend to the entire computer. Covers applications configured to send their connections over Tor. Other programs can communicate outside that network, and certain downloaded documents can open external connections when run with another application.
The airplane episode allows us to understand another limit, outside of encryption. A tool can protect data transit while leaving content visible on the device. In Thornton’s case, the complaint began with a passenger observing and photographing the screen—a physical exposure that the browser’s privacy features do not prevent.