Posted on Monday, September 09 2013 @ 13:13 CEST by Thomas De Maesschalck
One of the most popular anonymous Internet services is the free Tor project but a report
by the Washington Post suggests users of this service are unlikely to be completely safeguarded from government snooping. There's no hard evidence of a backdoor in Tor, but the paper points out that in 2012, 40 percent of the Tor Project's operating budget came from the US Department of Defense and that other US government branches like the US State Department and the National Science Foundation attributed another 20 percent of Tor's buget.
Tor Executive Director Andrew Lewman wrote in an e-mail to users that just because the project accepts federal funding does not mean it collaborated with the NSA to unmask people’s online identities.
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“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,” Lewman wrote. “Don’t assume that ‘the government’ is one coherent entity with one mindset.”
And Roger Dingledine, a founder of the Tor Project, says that the Defense Department money is much more like a research grant than a procurement contract.
