When the Tor Project was announced a decade ago, Google was still largely seen as fulfilling its corporate motto, “Don’t be evil,” and Twitter didn’t even exist. But researchers Roger Dingledine, Nick Mathewson, and Paul Syverson could already see trouble on the horizon. Created in a U.S. naval lab to safeguard government communications, their brainchild the Tor Project is designed to protect anyone and everyone from the dangers of Big Brother. The free software, now relied on by hundreds of thousands of users daily, bounces information through the computers of 3,000 volunteers around the world, hiding the identity of the original user.
Foreign Policy Top 100 Global Thinkers
78. Roger Dingledine, Nick Mathewson, Paul Syverson
For making the web safe for whistleblowers.
Founders, Tor Project | Walpole, Mass.
Foreign Policy
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2012/11/26/the_fp_100_global_thinkers?page=0,48#thinker78
When the Tor Project was announced a decade ago, Google was still largely seen as fulfilling its corporate motto, “Don’t be evil,” and Twitter didn’t even exist. But researchers Roger Dingledine, Nick Mathewson, and Paul Syverson could already see trouble on the horizon. Created in a U.S. naval lab to safeguard government communications, their brainchild the Tor Project (which stands for “the onion router”) is designed to protect anyone and everyone from the dangers of Big Brother. The free software, now relied on by hundreds of thousands of users daily, bounces information through the computers of 3,000 volunteers around the world, hiding the identity of the original user.
Operated by just 15 full-time employees with a budget just over $1 million, thanks to grants from the U.S. State Department and the National Science Foundation, Tor allows people who otherwise might be silenced online — whether corporate whistleblowers or domestic-violence victims — to bring important information to light. It has become an especially critical tool over the last two years as activists and journalists from Bahrain to Syria find themselves the targets of increasingly tech-savvy tyrants. “We developed Tor originally with civil liberties in mind,” Dingledine told an interviewer. “We want to let people in free countries be able to communicate and secure their communications so they can keep their freedoms.” Bit by bit, it’s working.