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comment by haymakers9th
haymakers9th  ·  3943 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: I live in a Surveillance State

I'll be damned.

    Originally sponsored by the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory[8] (which had been instrumental in the early development of onion routing under the aegis of DARPA), Tor was financially supported by the Electronic Frontier Foundation from 2004 to 2005.[10] Tor software is now developed by the Tor Project, which has been a 501(c)(3) research-education nonprofit organization [11] based in the United States of America [1] since December 2006. It has a diverse base of financial support;[10] the U.S. State Department, the Broadcasting Board of Governors, and the National Science Foundation are major contributors.[12] As of 2012, 80% of the Tor Project's $2M annual budget comes from the United States government, with the Swedish government and other organizations providing the rest,[13] including NGOs and thousands of individual sponsors.[14]

wiki link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tor_(anonymity_network)#History

That's very interesting, I haven't played with Tor in a long time but I never got the impression it even needed a lot of funding. I just kind of thought it was more of a grassroots open source project.





humanodon  ·  3943 days ago  ·  link  ·  

It's probably not an accident that Tor doesn't dissuade people from thinking that.

cgod  ·  3943 days ago  ·  link  ·  

The Tor guys are pretty open about how they got their funding and their relationships with government. I'd say most the time they give talks it comes up at least tangentially. Both of the developers have faced harassment by government officials and support for their work. The U.S. government is a big operation with many competing interest.