You've installed apt-transport-tor to help prevent targeted attacks on your system. Great! Now you want to build Debian packages using cowbuilder, and you notice these are still using plain HTTP. If you're willing to fetch the first few packages without using apt-transport-tor, this is as easy as: Add 'EXTRAPACKAGES="apt-transport-tor"' to your pbuilderrc. Run 'cowbuilder --update' Set 'MIRRORSITE=tor+http://http.debian.net/debian' in pbuilderrc. Run 'cowbuilder --update' again. Now any future builds should fetch build-dependencies over Tor.

apt-transport-tor 0.2.1 should now be on your preferred unstable Debian mirror. It will let you download Debian packages through Tor. New in this release: support for HTTPS over Tor, to keep up with people.debian.org. :) I haven't mentioned it before on this blog. To get it working, you need to "apt-get install apt-transport-tor", and then use sources.list lines like so: deb tor+http://http.debian.net/debian unstable main Note the use of http.