Why? Because the more servers are online, the faster will be. Tor platform is based in a volunteering platform and there’s a lot of people and organisations who participate: volunteers, non-profit orgs, VPN providers, Universities and, of course, Government Agencies, who also have servers to route traffic into the Tor Network. Īs I said before, the technology is based on a 3 phase public proxy chain, using TCP protocol (only), but there is a lot more to learn about this, so let’s go inside of it.

Therefore, this basically means that every year US budget dedicates an amount of money to “The Tor Project” foundation. Because of that, in my point of view, this decision is motivated by the support of any kind of technology that can screw up US traditional enemies plans, who by the way have strong censorship inside their borders, for example China and the Russian Federation. We can also see this duality when institutions like NSA designs and supports the use of strong ciphers and algorithms for encryption while, at the same time, they try to break it. Well, as always, in the US intelligence there are some complicated relationships between the budget dedicated to “break things” and the one to “create ‘n spread things”. Why a US military platform is released, and why is it doing it for free to the public to avoid censorship if it was useful for Intel? There is of course a bad use of this platform, which is probably the cause of its infamous reputation: using the onion routing to hide their identity to commit crimes.

Both foundations changed the use of the onion routing to increase their focus on avoiding and bypassing censorship and ISP surveillance around the world, making the internet more free. In the year 2001 Tor was released to the public and then managed first by the “EFF”(Electronic Frontier Foundation) from 2004 to 2005 and then by “The Tor Project”. Lately, Tor has changed far from his origins. In his origins, TOR was a project designed to obfuscate and hide the traffic and location of the source, making it easier for intelligence services to communicate without revealing their position, and harder for counter-intelligence teams to detect and locate the source.

Tor onion routing