German legislation makes it difficult to run an open WIFI hotspot: Not only will the police possibly search your house if somebody decides to commit criminal acts using your connection, you will also be liable via Störerhaftung for copyright-“crime” committed using your connection.

Despite the difficulties I am a big fan of offering open WIFI, and there is a large Café right across the street from my house which does not offer free WIFI on their own. Recently it hit me: Why not just make it a TOR hotspot? TOR is a free, strong anonymizing network run by volunteers like me. Data is redirected over three encrypted computers, making it impossible to trace data back to the users computer. If the Internet connection from the open WIFI passes through TOR nobody’s gonna ring my doorbell if somebody misbehaves.

Said was nearly done: used a Raspberry PI 2 I had so far no use for and combined it with a high power usb-wifi-adapter from amazon. After that it was only a matter of following the onion pi tutorial (but opting to run hostapd without encryption).

If you decide to do the same please consider doing it like I do: run a middle relay or a bridge on your pi in parallel to the access point (unless you pay per traffic) to give back to the TOR network that you use. Middle relays and bridges do not allow others to access the web from your connection, so they are quite safe to run even on a home connection.