The U.S Government Funds 60% Of The Tor Project

A report by the Washington Post has revealed that the U.S government actually funds 60% of the Tor project. It has already been proven that the Tor project is not secure enough to be an anonymous safeguard to avoid NSA snooping (your identity can eventually be revealed after a while with enough monitoring) but could their be a “more sinister” reason for that? Well if you like joining dots together then you might believe the fact the U.S government funds 60% of the Tor project is why this vulnerability easily exists.

Apparently the U.S Department of Defense contributed 40% of the Tor Project’s 2012 budget while the U.S State Department and other government agencies contributed another 20% making 60% of the total funding U.S government provided. Of course this isn’t anything new, nor is it a secret either, but with a heightened environment of distrust in the U.S government closer attention is being paid to Tor and where it gets its funding from.

“The parts of the U.S. and Swedish governments that fund us through contracts want to see strong privacy and anonymity exist on the Internet in the future, Don’t assume that ‘the government’ is one coherent entity with one mindset.”  Wrote Tor Executive Direction Andrew Lewman.

As always this kind of suspicion doesn’t stand up to full scrutiny because if the NSA wanted to alter Tor to implement a back door for example, this wouldn’t exactly go unnoticed as developers and contributors working on the code would easily see these changes. The Tor Project are also confident that the U.S government are not in a position to pressure Tor as the U.S government relies on the security of the Tor service in certain agencies and departments.

Image courtesy of Tor