U.S military denying involvement

Despite being created by military scientists at a naval base, the United States government has gone to enormous lengths to try and keep their continual involvement with Tor to a minimum. Before Tor registered as an independent non-profit in 2007 the US naval handed it over to the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Whilst it was continually developed over the next 3 years, it was funded through “pass-through” grants (Levine, 2014). Pass-through grants consist of money which ultimately comes from US government distributed through some independent third-party. The EFF also continued to try and stifle the role that the government continued to have with Tor with early press releases from the company refusing to mention how the router was developed or for what purposes. By reaffirming the positives that Tor provided, such as anonymity of free speech and the ability to search for information that may not be available on the surface web, the EFF drew focus away from a relationship with the government.

However, the EFF were not alone when trying minimizing the discussion about Tor’s ties to the military. Numerous technology magazines refused to talk about Tor’s history and why it came to be. Arguably the most notable of these absences featured in 2005 when major tech magazine Wired wrote the first profile for Tor. The article suggested that the U.S military no longer had ties with the router and that the work had been passed to “two Boston programmers” (Zetter, 2005). The article went on further to suggest that the programmers reformatted the onion router completely and had run it without any influence from the government.
However, these statements were untrue. Both of the programmers had been paid by the government since the early 2000’s and would continue to see paycheques until 2012. One of the programmers was even quoted at a tech conference confirming his affiliation with the government;

“I contract for the United States Government to build anonymity technology for them and deploy it. They don’t think of it as anonymity technology, although we use that term. They think of it as security technology. They need these technologies so they can research people they are interested in.” (Digledine, 2006)

With continual payments through third part companies and the ongoing need to hide identities of military personnel from prying eyes, Tor’s links with the military are as important today as they were in the beginning.

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