Why governments fund TOR?

[andrew at torproject.org]

On Wed, Dec 30, 2009 at 10:49:12PM +0530, arshad3m at gmail.com wrote 0.5K bytes in 13 lines about:
: may i know why governmetns fund TOR. i read 49% funds coming from
: government. TOR is usually considered for passing government restriction
: by journalists and activists. so why should governments fund this?

Paul's already answered about how Tor and onion routing was started, so
I'll skip that bit.  

Someone's already pointed you at the torusers page, so I'll skip that
too.

Governments fund tor to:

- promote democracy
- protect their agents doing sting operations or investigations
- promote free speech where it doesn't exist
- protect whistleblowers
- provide freedom of access to an unfiltered internet
- protect their soldiers in hostile environments
- protect their employees identity while working online

People in governments use tor for the same reason you use it. 

-- 
Andrew Lewman
The Tor Project
pgp 0x31B0974B

Website: https://torproject.org/
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