is the tor project affiliated with the us government

Prominent award-winning journalists from Wired, Vice, The Intercept, The Guardian and Rolling Stone - including Laura Poitras, Glenn Greenwald and Andy Greenberg - all helped pump up Tor’s mythical anti-state rebel status. Fight for the Future, the hip Silicon Valley activist group, declared Tor to be “NSA-proof.” Edward Snowden held it up as an example of the kind of grassroots privacy technology that could defeat government surveillance online, and told his followers to use it. The Electronic Frontier Foundation held up Tor as the digital equivalent of the First Amendment. Tor was military contractor with its own government contractor number - a privatized extension of the very same government that it claimed to be fighting.įor years, the Tor Project - along with other government-funded crypto tools like Signal - has been seen in almost religious terms by the privacy community as the only way to protect people from government spying online.

national security agencies: the Navy, the State Department and the BBG. I was able to show that despite its radical anti-government cred, Tor was almost 100% funded by three U.S.

By following the money, I discovered that Tor was not grassroots. By then I had already spent a couple of years doing extensive reporting on Tor’s deeply conflicted ties to the regime change wing of the U.S. In the process of writing my book Surveillance Valley, I was able to obtain via FOIA roughly 2,500 pages of correspondence - including strategy sessions and contracts and budgets and status updates - between the Tor Project and its main funder, a CIA spinoff now known as the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG), an agency that oversees America’s foreign broadcasting operations like Radio Free Asia and Radio Free Europe.

The Tor Project, a private non-profit that underpins the dark web and enjoys cult status among privacy activists, is almost 100% funded by the US government.

Is the tor project affiliated with the us government