Why governments fund TOR?

Kyle Williams kyle.kwilliams at gmail.com
Wed Dec 30 22:05:12 UTC 2009


On Wed, Dec 30, 2009 at 1:18 PM, Paul Syverson <syverson at itd.nrl.navy.mil>wrote:

> On Wed, Dec 30, 2009 at 10:39:56AM -0700, Jim wrote:
> >
> >
> > arshad wrote:
> > > hi all,
> > > forgive me for my ignorance.
> > > may i know why governmetns fund TOR. i read 49% funds coming from
> > > government. TOR is usually considered for passing government
> restriction
> > > by journalists and activists. so why should governments fund this?
> >
> > I can't speak for all governments but it might be relevant to point out
> >  that onion routing started (as I understand it -- anybody, feel free to
> > correct) as a project of the U.S. Navy and was used by the various
> > branches of the U.S armed forces to use the Internet anonymously.
> > Trouble was, that although their targets could not tell *exactly* who
> > was visiting their website, they could tell it was U.S. military.  So,
> > as I understand it, they released the technology so they could hide
> > among the civilians.
> >
> > Even within a particular govt you can have conflicting goals.  Part may
> > wish to prevent its citizens from being anonymous while another part may
> > find it useful to use civilians for cover.
> >
> > Just my speculation ...
>
> I'm not speaking for any government, including my employer or my
> funders, but I can say something about why we, the inventors of onion
> routing and designers of Tor, did what we did. We were as explicit as
> possible as to what we intended and why with funders, management and
> others. Presumably some of it was agreeable since we received support.
> The above is largely correct, so I am only clarifying where I thought
> there was room for misinterpretation.  The primary purpose for which
> we proposed and designed onion routing networks (including Tor, which
> started life in some of my NRL onion routing projects) was to separate
> identification from routing, as we note in the first onion routing
> publication "Hiding Routing Information" in 1996 and at
> www.onion-router.net.  Jim's speculation on the above cited motivation
> was not something we ran across through experience but rather a design
> motivation from the very beginning. We argued fifteen years ago that
> to protect private traffic when going to and from a public network you
> needed to carry traffic for others not just yourself, which meant that
> they had to trust the network, which meant that you had to diffuse
> trust by letting others run part of the infrastructure and that you
> had to let them see the code. I think this is essentially stated in
> our early onion routing publications. This was also part of the reason
> we sought and received our first publication release for public
> distribution of onion routing code in 1996. We were open source before
> that phrase was in general use. My comments apply only to the funding
> I received and the motivations we had. Other later goals of, e.g.,
> censorship resistance and other funding of Tor I have not been part of
> and should let others comment.
>
> HTH,
> Paul
> ***********************************************************************
> To unsubscribe, send an e-mail to majordomo at torproject.org with
> unsubscribe or-talk    in the body. http://archives.seul.org/or/talk/
>

I like hearing the history of this project, and wouldn't mind hearing more
about the challenges you faced back then, who the challengers were, and what
their point of view and/or concerns were.

Paul, thank you for all your hard work!

- K
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-talk/attachments/20091230/5d7084a7/attachment.htm>


More information about the tor-talk mailing list