[bobwebb]

The program was originally developed by the US Navy to help them protect their own communications, as part of their onion routing project: http://www.onion-router.net/ I have no idea what kind of involvement they have right now, but if a 'backdoor' was introduced by the US Government (I assume this is what conspiracy-theorists are scared of), people would know about it. After all, Tor is open source.