is the tor project affiliated with the us government

The most plausible and believable explanation for this baffling 'principal sponsor' status here, is that they want their intelligence agencies (and military and law enforcement) to be able to use this invaluable resource for their own, and mission-critical, anonymous browsing (and in as large an anonymity set as possible, so that they don't stick out like a sore thumb broadcasting themselves as covert government agents to every webserver out there). On one hand, the government directly or indirectly provides a large portion of Tor's budget, as you pointed out. After all, the project came in handy for former NSA contractor Edward Snowden for and CITIZENFOUR documentarian and journalist Laura Poitras.In the end, the Tor network is a love/ hate property when it comes to the US government. Steele went on to add: “I can't deny that there are lots of people within the Tor community, and lots of people who either are users of Tor or would be users of Tor, who are concerned about the fact that so much of the money – or any of the money – is coming from US government sources.”įunding for encryption tools such as Tor by US agencies may come across to some as counterintuitive. As the new head of Tor, Steele said they are looking to become more “responsive to the things that the Tor Project itself thinks are the most important things to be working on rather than what its funders think are important.”

In an interview with Ars Technica, Shari Steele, the head of the non-profit, said that they are hoping to reduce their dependency on the government for funding. Read more Tor Project accuses FBI of paying university to ‘deanonymize’ users without warrantĪround 75 percent of the funding for the project – about $2.5 million a year, as of 2014 – came from the United States government, including such high-profile agencies as the State Department, according to the website Ars Technica, and also the Department of Defense, according to the Washington Post.

Is the tor project affiliated with the us government