The Tor network did not start as a privacy tool for the public. It started as a US Naval Research Laboratory project in the 1990s, and its path from military research to a nonprofit relied on by journalists and activists worldwide took more than a decade.
Before Tor: Onion Routing at the Naval Research Lab
The concept behind Tor traces back to 1995, when researchers David Goldschlag, Michael Reed, and Paul Syverson at the US Naval Research Laboratory designed the first onion routing prototypes. Their idea was straightforward: route traffic through several servers and encrypt it in layers, so no single server along the path could see both who was sending a message and where it was ultimately going. The goal at the time was mainly to protect government and military communications, not to build a public tool.
From Military Research to a Public Network
In the early 2000s, two MIT graduates, Roger Dingledine and Nick Mathewson, began building a new implementation of onion routing while working with Syverson under a Naval Research Laboratory contract. Tor was first released publicly on September 20, 2002, with its code published under a free and open software license. By the end of 2003 the network had grown to roughly a dozen volunteer-run relays. In 2004, Dingledine and Mathewson presented the paper Tor: The Second-Generation Onion Router, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation began funding the project and acting as its fiscal sponsor.
Becoming a Nonprofit
On December 22, 2006, Dingledine, Mathewson, and five others formally established The Tor Project, Inc., a Massachusetts-based 501(c)(3) research and education nonprofit. That structure separated Tor from any single government contract or corporate sponsor and gave it an independent basis for accepting funding from a wider range of sources, including grants, donations, and continued EFF support, while keeping the software free and open source.
Milestones That Shaped Tor
The years that followed added the pieces most people associate with Tor today. Bridges arrived in 2007 to help users reach the network from countries that actively block or filter it. Work on the Tor Browser began in 2008, turning a command-line tool for developers into something anyone could install and use. Tor became a key piece of infrastructure for activists during the Arab Spring in 2010, and its role in Edward Snowden’s 2013 disclosures brought the project a level of public attention it had never had before. Thousands of volunteer-run relays now carry traffic for millions of people worldwide, almost all of whom will never touch a line of the underlying research that started it.