From exile you do what you can: you share, you denounce, you march, you send money. All of that counts, but all of that is indirect. I have spent a while looking for something material, something measurable, that puts nobody back home at risk.
It exists, and it takes five minutes. I have been running one since September 3, 2026, on the same server this blog lives on.
What Snowflake is
When a government blocks access to the Tor network, someone inside needs an intermediary: a machine in a free country that receives their connection and carries it into the network for them. That is a bridge.
Snowflake turns your browser into one of those bridges. You install an extension, leave it switched on, and when someone in a censored country needs to get through, their connection bounces off your browser and carries on. You do not have to do anything else. There is no dashboard to watch and no configuration to tune.
And there is a neat technical detail: Snowflake uses WebRTC, the same technology behind video calls. To a censor inspecting traffic, that connection does not look like Tor: it looks like someone on a video call. Blocking it would mean blocking video calls for the whole country.
Who this actually helps
Here is the figure that forces me to correct the framing of this article. I went to look at the Tor Project’s public metrics, which anyone can consult, and Snowflake usage by country over the last measured week is this:
| Country | Daily users |
|---|---|
| Russia | ~19,150 |
| Iran | ~2,350 |
| China | ~1,720 |
| Turkmenistan | ~204 |
| Belarus | ~108 |
| Venezuela | ~11 |
| Cuba | 1 to 3 |
Almost nobody in Cuba uses it: between one and three people a day in the whole country. If you run a Snowflake, in practice you will be helping Russians and Iranians, not Cubans.
And it makes sense, because it fits what the rest of this series argues. The tool with real adoption in Cuba is Psiphon: a million and a half people in July 2021. Tor barely has a presence there, because it is slow and eats data that is expensive to buy, and above all because Cuban repression is not primarily a network problem: it is legal and social. What the island needs is access, not cryptographic anonymity. Russia and Iran are the opposite case: massive network blocking and a population that wants exactly Tor.
I say this because the article talks about helping from exile, and a Cuban reader may take it to mean helping their own. It does not, and I would rather say so myself before someone else checks: the Tor metrics are public and two clicks away.
Does that make it not worth doing? No. Nineteen thousand Russians a day escaping their government’s censorship are still nineteen thousand people, and which dictatorship you happened to get does not change which side you are on. But it is work against authoritarianism in general, with no Cuban surname on it, and calling it anything else would be selling you something it is not.
Why it does not expose you
This is the part to understand properly, because it is what makes the recommendation a responsible one.
Your browser is an entry point, never an exit. It receives the censored person’s connection and hands it to a Tor entry relay. Your involvement ends there. You never see traffic in the clear, you never connect to the site that person visits, and all you forward are already encrypted bytes.
The practical consequence: the websites that person visits will see the address of the Tor exit node, not yours. You will not get complaints for what someone else did, because your connection never appears anywhere. The Tor Project sums it up like this: there is no more risk in running a Snowflake than in using Tor Browser itself.
How to do it
Find the Snowflake extension for Firefox or Chrome, install it, and leave the toggle on. That is it. You can switch it off whenever you like from the same icon.
If you have a server running, there is a standalone version that does considerably more work, because it is available around the clock and does not depend on your browser being open.
A warning I cannot leave out. Everything above applies to someone in a free country. If you are in Cuba, do not run a Snowflake.
In countries where the Tor network itself is criminalized, operating its infrastructure is a real risk for whoever operates it. The Tor Project is explicit: Snowflake is for volunteers in free countries. The rule inverts, as it does with almost everything in this series: what costs me nothing can cost someone on the island a great deal.
What it does not solve
Just in case, so nobody leaves with the wrong idea.
Snowflake helps someone reach the Tor network when their country blocks it. It does nothing about the other two problems I keep coming back to in this series: it does not protect a confiscated phone and it does not stop someone in your group from talking. It is an access tool, and access is only part of the problem.
Nor do I have current measurement data on whether ETECSA blocks Tor in Cuba today. What is documented is that the censored sites include those of circumvention tools themselves, and that the blocking has escalated in method over the years. Snowflake exists precisely for when the blocking arrives.
Why I am writing this
I will publish the figures from my own proxy here once I have some worth publishing. With a warning up front: it will be a number I report, and nobody can check it from outside. The Tor Project does not publish a list of proxies, and cannot, because that list would be exactly the blocklist a censor needs. That this cannot be verified is a security property of the system, not a convenience of mine.
Because almost everything we do from outside is symbolic, and the symbolic is needed too, but it wears you down. This is not that. It is a checkbox in a browser that, while you sleep, is serving as a door for somebody.
You will never know who, or from where, or what for. And that, if you think about it, is exactly as it should be.