They know they can't control everyone, and everything, so Tor is a compromising (for the NSA) way, to at least maintain some order to the chaos that is the Internet's fierce, rebellious and fierce liberties/dissident community. Like the fenced-off 'savage reservations' in Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. So long as the NSA has better intelligence powers than anyone else - one could theorize that, although 'Tor Stinks', it is still in their global long-term strategic interest to actually PROVIDE Tor, as a smart way to maintain top dog status and keep their overarching reign of intelligence in the world - their line of thought would be, 'So long as WE stay ahead of the curve, let's just nurture and encourage Tor along so all the criminals and dissidents are at least put in one place and make our XKeyscore filtering that bit easier too'.ĭon't think of it as 'control' - but 'management'. On the other hand, the government has every reason to want to break this anonymity, when others use it to thwart its own surveillance reach which clearly has become more important to them but developing slightly later in time than their already-existing priority to release Tor to the public, and increase its efficacy for their own use itself. They want it to continue, and to be robust - at least against any attacker that doesn't have the resources and hacking power that they do. The very fact that Tor started out as a government project for the Military in the nascent days of the World Wide Web (very early on - even before HTTPS became widespread), proves that it has been a high priority for their own intelligence agencies from very early on, and I see no reason for that to change any time soon. The most plausible and believable explanation for this baffling 'principal sponsor' status here, is that they want their intelligence agencies (and military and law enforcement) to be able to use this invaluable resource for their own, and mission-critical, anonymous browsing (and in as large an anonymity set as possible, so that they don't stick out like a sore thumb broadcasting themselves as covert government agents to every webserver out there). On one hand, the government directly or indirectly provides a large portion of Tor's budget, as you pointed out. In the end, the Tor network is a love/ hate property when it comes to the US government.
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