[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.