The Tor Project is a great way
for people to cover their tracks on the Internet. Because of this,
some in the federal government, specifically the National Security
Agency (NSA),
really dislikes Tor. So it comes as a bit of a surprise that
the project actually received over $1.8 million in federal money
last year.
The Tor Project, which provides free software to users
interested in surveillance- and censorship-resistant web activity,
recently released its financial statements and reports for 2013,
and sources began taking note yesterday.
The documents
show that the State Department directly granted the
organization $256,900 as part of its mission to fund “international
programs [that] support democracy, human rights and labor.”
Additional indirect funding from State Department money added up to
$882,313.
The Department of Defense didn’t provide any direct funding, but
through SRI International, “a non-profit research and development
centre that aims to bridge the gap between abstract research and
industry”
according to The Guardian, the Tor Project landed
another $830,269. SRI’s funding went toward “basic and applied
research and development in areas relating to the Navy command,
control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance, and
reconnaissance.”
Additional funding from the U.S. Agency for International
Development and the National Science Foundation added up to a
total of $1,822,907 either directly or indirectly from the federal
government.
This is a boost over 2012, when Tor received a total of $1.2
million in federal money, all of which was indirect,
notes The Guardian.
Tor has
rockier relations with
other tentacles of the feds, though. BBC provides some
history:
Tor was thrust into the spotlight in the wake of controversy
resulting from leaks about the National Security Agency and other
cyberspy agencies. Edward Snowden, the whistleblower who revealed
the internal memos and who now has asylum in Russia, uses
a version of Tor software to communicate.Documents released by Mr Snowden allege that the NSA and the
UK’s GCHQ had repeatedly tried to crack anonymity on the Tor
network.Tor was originally set up by the US Naval Research Laboratory
and is used be people who want to send information over the
internet without being tracked.
Part of the network’s success lies
in the fact that it “has gone mainstream in the past few years, and
its wide diversity of users — from civic-minded individuals
and ordinary consumers to activists, law enforcement, and companies
— is part of its security.”
Tor made headlines earlier this month when a yet-unidentified
whistleblower leaked information suggesting that
the NSA is still trying to crack the network and snoop on
anybody who uses the anonymizing network as well as people who
simply browses websites that regularly discuss Tor … like
Reason.
Watch Reason TV’s interview with the Tor Project’s development
director:
from Hit & Run http://ift.tt/1qLgTi4
via IFTTT