The Tor Files

I’ve been asked to provide better access to the files I obtained almost a decade ago that revealed the inner workings of the Tor Project’s relationship with the U.S. government.

People who’ve read Surveillance Valley know why Tor is an interesting organization to study if you want to understand the depth of ongoing U.S. security state involvement in the internet.

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The Tor Project is a private non-profit that underpins the dark web and has enjoyed cult status among anti-government privacy activists and libertarian crypto anarchists who say it will protect you from government surveillance. Edward Snowden has been a big Tor promotor, as has Julian Assange. The thing about Tor, though, is that it is private and anti-government only in its public facing image. The organization, which was spun off from a US Naval intelligence project, has continued to receive the bulk of its budget from the very U.S. security state that it claims to be fighting. Its backers have included the Pentagon, the State Department, and the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG).

In the process of writing my book Surveillance Valley, I was able to obtain via FOIA roughly 2,500 pages of correspondence — including strategy and contracts and budgets and status updates — between the Tor Project and its main funder, a Central Intelligence Agency propaganda spinoff now known as the Broadcasting Board of Governors (now known as the US Agency for Global Media). These files showed close cooperation between Tor and this regime change wing of the US government. They also revealed the agency financing some of the most famous privacy activists in the world…

As I wrote at the time:

The Electronic Frontier Foundation held up Tor as the digital equivalent of the First Amendment. The ACLU backed it. Fight for the Future, the hip Silicon Valley activist group, declared Tor to be “NSA-proof.” Edward Snowden held it up as an example of the kind of grassroots privacy technology that could defeat government surveillance online, and told his followers to use it. Prominent award-winning journalists from Wired, Vice, The Intercept, The Guardian and Rolling Stone — including Laura Poitras, Glenn Greenwald and Andy Greenberg — all helped pump up Tor’s mythical anti-state rebel status. Even Daniel Ellsberg, the legendary whistleblower, was convinced that Tor was vital to the future of democracy. Anyone who questioned this narrative and pointed to Tor’s lavish government support was attacked, ridiculed, smeared and hounded into silence.

But…

The documents showed Tor employees taking orders from their handlers in the federal government, including hatching plans to deploy their anonymity tool in countries that the U.S. was working to destabilize: China, Iran, Vietnam, Russia. They showed discussions about the need to influence news coverage and to control bad press. They featured monthly updates that described meetings and trainings with the CIA, NSA, FBI, DOJ and State Department. They also revealed plans to funnel government funds to run “independent” Tor nodes. Most shockingly, the FOIA documents put under question Tor’s pledge that it would never put in any backdoors into their software. The documents conclusively showed that Tor is not independent at all. The organization did not have free reign to do whatever it wanted, but was kept on a short leash and bound by contracts with strict contractual obligations. It was also required to file detailed monthly status reports, giving the government a clear picture of what Tor employees were developing, where they went and who they saw.”

I released these files to the public back in 2018 when I published my book. I’m linking to them here again. Why? Because many of the pages from back then are delinked or down. The information is hard to retrieve. The internet wants you to forget.

The files are sitting on DocumentCloud: You can view them by following this link.

—Yasha Levine

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Want to know more?

• BBG / USAGM funding of Tor

• Pentagon funding of Tor

• State Department funding of Tor

• My profile of the shady privacy movement: The Crypto Keepers

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