The navy backed the research of hackers because their interests aligned . The hackers built the damn thing on their own . They are directly aiding intelligencies and the geopolitical interests of the western powers . Christ fucking on a stick , the anarchists in Rojava aided the geopolitical interests of the US . So fucking what ? That is absolutely irrelevant to anything . We ' re not kneejerk antiimps . Occasionally anarchist goals will briefly align with the interests of superpowers . The way the funding works is Tor Project lays out a series of selfmade goals and then drums up money for them from various sources . They don ' t take grants that have stipulations in directions they don ' t agree with . One of the downsides is that no government is willing to fund development on Hidden Services , so the Tor devs have had to do that on their own use funds raised through small donations . That ' s clearly an instance of the state being like hey our interests don ' t align here and Tor being like well fuck you , we ' re doing it anyway . The NSA has in its budget billions spent on deanonymizing Tor traffic . Tor devs remove nodes that they suspect are compromised by the NSA . There ' s also thousands of nodes from vastly different sources and orgs , which deeply constrains observers . The fucking Snowden papers are utterly clear on this Tor sucks as the NSA put it . They can sometimes get a small fraction of traffic , but that ' s it . There are of course always theoretical attacks being developed and Tor encourages this as a good auditing practice and they implement fixes in response . The security and cryptographer expert community is uniform in their praise for Tor . Not a perfect tool at all , but damn good . And claiming that ' anarchist lives ' are ' repeatedly saved ' by tor is a fucking joke . Oh fuck off you piece of shit . You truly do not know what the fuck you ' re talking about . Security culture bars me from talking about shit in first world western countries but I can certify that Tor has definitely saved anarchist lives in Syria and you ' d be a goddamn idiot to not expect that .