[tor-talk] Iran cracks down on web dissident technology

[Paul Syverson]

On Sun, Mar 20, 2011 at 10:04:45PM -0500, Edward Langenback wrote:
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> Joe Btfsplk wrote:
> > On 3/20/2011 5:08 PM, Eugen Leitl wrote:
> >> http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/iran/8388484/Iran-cracks-down-on-web-dissident-technology.html
> >>
> >> Iran cracks down on web dissident technology...
> >>
> >> ...  The value of ???internet freedom??? technologies to US
> >> foreign policy has not gone unnoticed in Washington: the Tor Project???s arms
> >> race with Iranian authorities is_funded in part by grants from both the
> >> Department of Defense and the State Department_.
> >> _______________________________________________
> >> tor-talk mailing list
> >> tor-talk at lists.torproject.org
> >> https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-talk
> > You've GOT to be kidding.  Tell me that's a mistake.  Tor Project, 
> > dedicated to privacy & anonymity, takes $ from DoD & Sam?  While the US 
> > spies on it's citizens, unconstitutionally?  That's rich.
> > Honestly, this enlightenment will make me reconsider ever using Tor for 
> > anything I don't want sent directly to DC.  It's like trusting car 
> > magazines' reviews that get their advertising $ from car manufacturers.  
> > There is no way the fed is going to give $ to any "privacy" organization 
> > w/o wanting something (cough, back door) in return.  Every ISP has been 
> > forced into violating users' privacy.  Why would Tor project, after 
> > taking $ from Sam, be any different?  OK users, go ahead & stick your 
> > head in the sand.
> > 
> > EVEN if it's not true, for me, Tor project has lost a good deal of its 
> > credibility through its associations.  Of course, no government would 
> > ever lie & neither would a company (AT&T, Ford, Google, R.J. Reynolds...).
> 
> If I'm not mistaken, not only has TOR had at least some government /
> DOD funding from the start, the original project was started by the
> military.
> 

People seem to need a periodic refresher on this.
I will just state the long public and published facts.
Interpret them as you like. You can read more details at
http://www.onion-router.net/History.html
but here's a quick summary:

I invented onion routing at NRL with David Goldschlag and Mike Reed in
1995-96 as a US Naval Research Laboratory project with initial funding
from ONR. All of us were NRL employees at the time. Our first deployed
system was in 1996 and source code for that system was distributed
later that year. (Code was entirely US government work by US
government employees, so not subject to copyright.)

As part of a later NRL project, I created the version of onion routing
that became known as Tor along with Roger Dingledine and Nick
Mathewson starting in 2002. I have been an NRL employee throughout all
this.  Roger and Nick were contractors working on my project. NRL
projects funded by ONR and DARPA were the only funding they had to
work on Tor until 2004. The first publicly deployed Tor network was in
2003, which was also when the source code was made available and
publicly licensed under the MIT license.  The first funding Roger and
Nick got to work on Tor that was other than as part of an NRL project
was from the EFF starting in 2004.

Tor got funding from a variety of sources after that, including several
U.S. government projects, both before and since becoming a US 501 (c)(3)
nonprofit. You can find a summary at
https://torproject.org/about/sponsors.html.en

HTH,
Paul