Meet Tor, The Military-Made Privacy Network That Counts Edward Snowden As A Fan
When the U.S. Navy created Tor, a software that enables people to use the Internet anonymously, it didn't envision someone like Edward Snowden.
Quite the opposite: military programmers originally built the software in the mid-1990s to support government spying operations.
Yet last month, a photograph of Snowden, who leaked a trove of secrets about U.S. government surveillance, showed a sticker on his laptop supporting the Tor Project, the nonprofit that runs the anonymity network.
The image underscored the diverse -- and sometimes conflicting -- community of people using and supporting Tor to communicate anonymously on the Web.
Tor, which can be downloaded online, operates like a browser -- albeit slower because it is bouncing packets of data across several continents to protect anonymity. Journalists, whistleblowers, domestic abuse victims and dissidents living under repressive regimes use Tor to bypass government censors and prevent their online movements from being tracked. The U.S. State Department provides funding to the Tor Project to promote Internet freedom in other countries.
But the anonymizing software has also been used by whistleblowers to leak sensitive U.S. government secrets. Though it's unclear whether Snowden used Tor to disclose details about NSA surveillance to reporters, Wikileaks has reportedly used the software to protect whistleblowers.
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http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/07/18/tor-snowden_n_3610370.html
