NSA Tried to Crack U.S. Funded Anonymity Protection System

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The National Security Agency (NSA) has repeatedly tried to develop attacks against people using Tor, a software tool designed to protect online anonymity – and which is primarily funded and promoted by the U.S. government itself to help political activists, whistleblowers, militaries, and law enforcement officials.

Among the NSA documents disclosed by Edward Snowden, are documents detailing the NSA’s efforts and showing its successes against Tor.

Tor — acronym for The Onion Router – is an open-source public project which bounces its users’ Internet traffic through several other computers, which it calls “relays” or “nodes,” to keep it anonymous and avoid online censorship tools.Tor receives about 60 percent of its funding from the U.S. government, mostly from the State Department and Department of Defense, with the goal of having the anonymity tool help dissidents and activists in countries such as China, Iran, and Syria.

iHLS – Israel Homeland Security

The NSA’s documents acknowledge the service is popular in countries where the Internet is routinely under surveillance or is censored. One NSA presentation notes that among uses of Tor for “general privacy” and “non-attribution,” it can be used for “circumvention of nation state internet policies” — and is used by “dissidents” in Iran, China, etc.

In fact , the governments of both countries have tried to limit Tor’s use: China has repeatedly tried to block Tor entirely, while the main reason behind Iran’s efforts to create a “national Internet” entirely under government control was to prevent circumvention of such controls.