According to your investigation, the developers of Tor have had connections with government agencies, the NSA amongst them.
Well, it’s not just that some of the developers have ties to government agencies. The entire project was developed and continues to be actively funded by the U.S. National Security State: Pentagon, State Department, USAID and other federal government agencies that are dedicated to expanding U.S. power abroad.
The origins of Tor go back to 1995, when military scientists at the Naval Research Laboratory were tasked with developing technology that allowed intelligence and military personnel to work online undercover without fear of being unmasked by someone monitoring their Internet activity. Whether it was a undercover agent logging into his CIA.gov mail account from Syria or infiltrating a jihadist or animal rights online group — anyone looking at or sniffing the connection would immediately be able to blow their cover.
So a couple of scientists hit up on an idea called “onion routing” — a method that redirected traffic into a parallel peer-to-peer network and bounced it around randomly before sending it off to its final destination. The idea was to move it around so as to confuse and disconnect its origin and destination and make it impossible for someone to observe who you are or where you’re going on the Internet.
This research was bankrolled by the Office of Naval Research and DARPA. It was led by a team of scientists — Paul Syverson, Michael Reed and David Goldschlag — all of them working for the Naval Research Laboratory, sitting inside the massive Joint Base Anacostia-Bolling military base in Southeast Washington, D.C.
They built an “onion router” system that worked, but quickly realized that only technically anonymizing traffic was not enough — not if the system was being used exclusively by military and intelligence. In order to cloak spooks effectively, Tor needed to be used by a diverse group of people: activists, students, corporate researchers, soccer moms, journalists, drug dealers, hackers, child pornographers, foreign agents, terrorists — the more diverse the group, the better the spooks could hide in the crowd in plain sight.
That’s why starting in 2004, Tor was spun off as an independent open source project and began to distance itself from its military-intelligence ties.
Most people now think of Tor is somehow hostile to the U.S. government, but in fact it continues to receive the bulk of its funds from the same military-intelligence agencies that spawned it. In 2013, Tor got over 90% of its funding from the U.S. government, with the largest grant coming from the Pentagon.
Tor is essentially a private military contractor. It’s a small contractor and operates a non-profit, but it is a government contractor nonetheless. Tor co-founder Roger Dingledine even described his work that way, telling a security conference in 2004: “I contract for the United States Government to built anonymity technology for them and deploy it.”
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How was your article received by the Tor developers and the users’ community?
Not well. Not well at all.
Instead of being welcomed by the privacy community and sparking a discussion about the some of the troubling aspects of Tor, my reporting was met with a nasty smear campaign. It was led by some of the most prominent privacy and anti-surveillance activists in the country —top people from groups like the ACLU, Electronic Frontier Foundation, Freedom of the Press Foundation, and Pierre Omidyar’s First Look Media. None of them disputed the facts, but resorted to the kind of PR smear tactics one usually sees used by oil company PR flacks, but not by privacy hacktivists.
