[tor-talk] Interesting question on Quora "Tor: Why did the US government create and continue to fund Tor?"

[Peter Tonoli]

There's an interesting question on Quora about Tor at the moment - "Tor:
Why did the US government create and continue to fund Tor?", which can
be found at
<http://www.quora.com/Tor/Why-did-the-US-government-create-and-continue-to-fund-Tor>.

So far, there are 4 answers including.. ..

"Bram Cohen, Inventor of BitTorrent -
Many other countries have countrywide firewalls to limit what their
citizens/residents can see of the internet. The US State Department
views this as a bad thing and proactively promotes Tor because it's the
tool of choice for freely browsing the internet from behind such a
firewall, which appears to be the main use which Tor is put to."

"Brendan Guinn, IT Engineer, History Buff, Fumbling Guitarist

The same reason they created it--Tor allows essentially anonymous web
traffic, and if for no other purpose than insidious action against a
national enemy--but ranging from the original intended purpose of
protecting international & domestic agents*, to the actual state of
unhindered civilian usage of the system--any government would have a few
compelling reasons to fund a system which performs the function Tor does.

However, it's worth noting that the idea of onion routing--encrypting
traffic and randomly bouncing it from node to node, encrypting further
and decrypting from node to node as well, adding another layer (Geddit?)
to security--is a DARPA-funded, U.S. Navy development*. Of course
they're still funding it--it's their brainchild.
" {...}