View source for The Onion Router

== Surveillance ==
Tor was created to protect US intelligence online, and was originally made by a US [[Navy Seal]]. Development started in 1997 by [[DARPA]],  an agency of the U.S. Department of Defense responsible for the development of emerging technologies for use by the military. However, in 2002 the Naval Research Laboratory released the code for Tor under a free license.

In 2014, the Russian government offered a $111,000 contract to "study the possibility of obtaining technical information about users."

Even subsequent government studies have concluded that Tor is difficult to infiltrate, because the government would have to penetrate all three computers handling a particular message to be able to trace it back to its origin.  Because the number of active Tor nodes is large, and the middle node is assigned at random, most of the node computers on a Tor network would have to be compromised for the privacy of most messages to be broken.<ref>{{cite news|url=https://www.bloomberg.com/bw/articles/2014-01-23/tor-anonymity-software-vs-dot-the-national-security-agency|title=The Inside Story of Tor, the Best Internet Anonymity Tool the Government Ever Built|date=January 23, 2014 |work=Bloomburg Business|accessdate=February 29, 2016}}</ref> [[Edward Snowden]]'s leaks revealed that