28 May 2011

Onion Routing Not Tor Is a Lie

A sends:

Contrary to claims of some Tor Project developers, Tor -- the software itself -- was indeed actively developed by the US Navy.

Check for yourself from a Linux command-line:

$ git clone git://git.torproject.org/tor.git $ cd tor $ git log | grep navy.mil | uniq -c 46 Author: Paul Syverson <syverson@itd.nrl.navy.mil> 15 Author: Bruce Montrose <montrose@itd.nrl.navy.mil>

See also:

46 revisions to the software were made by Paul Syverson while he was working for the Navy, 15 revisions were by Bruce Montrose, also working for the Navy at the same lab.

Another tidbit: Matthew J. Edman also was once a Tor developer. He worked for the Navy too, as a graduate student under supervision of Syverson. He went on to work for NSA, among others.

Roger Dingledine (the lead Tor developer) also once worked for NSA.

The idea that onion routing as a concept is somehow independent from Tor is a lie. The two are one and the same and were developed in harmony.