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In March of 2017, Linux Magazine published an article titled Invisibility Cloak in which they described the Tails operating system and how it provides anonymity via Tor (Thommes 2017).  Several months later, Engadget ran a story called ‘Karma's New Hotspot Gives Users a Cloak of Invisibility’, describing a new Tor enabled router (England 2017).  Perhaps this conception of an invisibility cloak was best summed up in a Gizmodo article from 2014 titled ‘Tor Is Still Safe’, the first sentence of which reads “Tor is having a bit of a crisis, as it's become increasingly clear that the wildly popular network isn't the internet invisibility cloak it was once thought to be.” (Aguilar 2014)  While this notion of an invisibility cloak is attractive for many reasons - even romanticized in folklore and popular fiction - the focus on the technology itself perpetuates a dangerous misconception about anonymity on the Internet, and misses the real story of Tor: a conflict over what the cloak conceals.

Remember how long thou hast been putting off these things, and how often thou hast received an opportunity from the gods, and yet dost not use it. Thou must now at last perceive of what universe thou art a part, and of what administrator of the universe thy existence is an efflux, and that a limit of time is fixed for thee, which if thou dost not use for clearing away the clouds from thy mind, it will go and thou wilt go, and it will never return.