Recently,
journalist Yasha Levine claimed direct connection of the Tor browser
project with a CIA spinoff known as the Broadcasting Board of
Governors (BBG), based on information obtained through FOIA. As
described
by the journalist:
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. In the process of writing my book Surveillance
Valley, I was able to obtain via FOIA roughly 2,500 pages of
correspondence — including strategy 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). These
files show incredible cooperation between Tor and the regime change
wing of the US government.
As RT
reported:
According
to Levine’s research, Tor received “almost 100 percent” of its
funding from three US government agencies: the Navy, the State
Department, and the BBG. In collaboration with government agencies,
Tor even drew up plans to deploy their anonymity tool to countries
that Washington was actively working to destabilize – including
China, Iran and Russia.
Although
Levine claims there was never any doubt that Washington had
repurposed Tor as a “foreign policy weapons”
– arming foreign dissidents with the power to communicate
anonymously – he says that his document cache shows “collaboration
between the federal government, the Tor Project and key members of
the privacy and Internet Freedom movement on a level that was hard to
believe.”
[...]
The
alarming revelations from Levine’s data dump are not the first to
have implicated Tor in plotting with the US government, however. In
2016, a Tor developer was caught creating malware for the FBI to help
the agency spy on users of the supposed anonymity tool.
The core
principle of Tor, "onion routing", was developed in the
mid-1990s by United States Naval Research Laboratory employees,
mathematician Paul Syverson, and computer scientists Michael G. Reed
and David Goldschlag, with the purpose of protecting U.S.
intelligence communications online. Onion routing was further
developed by DARPA in 1997.
The
alpha version of Tor, developed by Syverson and computer scientists
Roger Dingledine and Nick Mathewson and then called The Onion Routing
project, or TOR project, launched on 20 September 2002. The first
public release occurred a year later. On 13 August 2004, Syverson,
Dingledine, and Mathewson presented "Tor: The Second-Generation
Onion Router" at the 13th USENIX Security Symposium. In 2004,
the Naval Research Laboratory released the code for Tor under a free
license, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) began funding
Dingledine and Mathewson to continue its development.
In
December 2006, Dingledine, Mathewson, and five others founded The Tor
Project, a Massachusetts-based 501(c)(3) research-education nonprofit
organization responsible for maintaining Tor. The EFF acted as The
Tor Project's fiscal sponsor in its early years, and early financial
supporters of The Tor Project included the U.S. International
Broadcasting Bureau, Internews, Human Rights Watch, the University of
Cambridge, Google, and Netherlands-based Stichting NLnet.
From
this period onward, the majority of funding sources came from the
U.S. government.
An
internal Stratfor email through WikiLeaks confirms that Tor was
created by the United States Navy Research Laboratory and it had
become a key tool for the protesters during the uprisings in the
so-called 'Arab Spring', especially in Egypt and Syria:
Tor (The
Onion Router) is a free anonymous network browser available to anyone
to use or abuse on virtually any PC (not macs or linux systems?). It
was originally created and deployed by the United States Navy
Research Laboratory in 2003 to provide secure governmental
communications.
Today
this software can be downloaded and used by anyone without license or
charge so they, like the military, can communicate on a network that
will provide full anonymity and privacy from network surveillance.
The idea and application of the anonymous network, Tor, is somewhat
old news; however, its original intended use for journalists,
ordinary people, the military, and law enforcement to communicate on
a private channel that is virtually untraceable and hack-proof (be
careful here - "hacking" can be defined broadly to include
DDOS and social engineering spam - both of which can affect TOR).
It
has enabled Chinese dissidents a means to possibly combat the
a**Great Firewall of Chinaa**, Egyptian protestors in its recent
revolution to circumvent Hosni Mubaraka**s Internet shutdown; as well
as, Syrian bloggers to communicate with other protestors around the
globe using encrypted messages.
Unintended
and criminal uses of Tor include pedophiles peddling child
pornographic material, drugs being purchased through the network
using the cryto-currency bitcoin and to be shipped via the postal
service to the buyers homes, (alleged? need to be clear HOW we know
about all of these activities) money laundering and weapon
manufacturing material to be released, and contract killers and
prostitutes to be bought all by the click of a mouse.
Yet, the
most interesting part comes in the description of 'Tor Network
Intended Users', where in the list we find that “Law
enforcement uses it for surveying websites without leaving government
IP addresses in web logs and for security stings.”,
indicating that Tor is a powerful surveillance tool in the hands of
the US intelligence.
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