[bee_rider]

TOR was sort of famously contributed to by a dude in US Naval research early on, right?

They are militaries, not police or intelligence forces. The job is to be ready to do war, not nanny and snoop on civilians (Some of that might be a necessary side effect but it isn’t their reason for being).

[tga_d]

The NRL originally developed onion routing and Tor. It was then open sourced, stewarded by the EFF for a few years, before becoming its own non-profit. The NRL still do a ton of work on Tor and its ecosystem, primarily through academic research and occasionally code, though the Tor Project is obviously now the biggest player in the space. The original motivation was to enable communicating with covert assets (intelligence services and the like) overseas, which requires lots of non-military cover traffic to be useful, hence the opening up. Its popularity as an anti-censorship tool has motivated a lot of the continued support from various US agencies, including the NRL. Really though, the NRL is a largely civilian institution, and while the people who work there do work for the military, they aren't typically enlisted, have limited security clearance if any, etc. It's sort of like the Navy's version of Microsoft Research, or Bell Labs.

[psunavy03]

Militaries need intelligence services to be their eyes and ears. That said, most people who are not in their country's armed forces, government, or intelligence service vastly overestimate how much another country's intelligence services actually care about them. Most people aren't that interesting and don't have any intelligence value for another country's government.

[red-iron-pine]

US Navy research labs developed onion routing and the core of Tor

arguably, one of the reasons it was released to the public was to get large amounts of traffic using onion routing. because if it's just 50 data steams that are entirely ONI or NSA then it's easy to hit them with timing attacks.

but 2+ million streams from all over makes it a lot easier to hide.

[dijit]

And SELinux was given to us by the NSA.