Should the US government support anonymous web browsing? By Dylan Stratman

What is Tor? Tor is free software for enabling anonymous communication. The name is derived from an acronym for the original software project name "The Onion Router“ Tor directs Internet traffic through a free, worldwide, volunteer network consisting of more than seven thousand relays to conceal a user's location and usage from anyone conducting network surveillance or traffic analysis Using Tor makes it more difficult for Internet activity to be traced back to the user: this includes "visits to Web sites, online posts, instant messages, and other communication forms“ Tor's use is intended to protect the personal privacy of users, as well as their freedom and ability to conduct confidential communication by keeping their Internet activities from being monitored.

History of Tor The core principle of Tor, "onion routing", was developed in the mid-1990s by United States Naval Research Laboratory employees, mathematician Paul Syverson and computer scientists Michael G. Reed and David Goldschlag, with the purpose of protecting U.S. intelligence communications online. Onion routing was further developed by DARPA in 1997 In December 2006, Dingledine, Mathewson and five others founded The Tor Project, a Massachusetts-based 501(c)(3) research-education nonprofit organization responsible for maintaining Tor.The EFF acted as The Tor Project's fiscal sponsor in its early years, and early financial supporters of The Tor Project included the U.S. International Broadcasting Bureau, Internews, Human Rights Watch, the University of Cambridge and Google. From this period onwards, the majority of funding sources came from the U.S. government.

The Tor Project's FAQ offers supporting reasons for the EFF's endorsement: "Criminals can already do bad things. Since they're willing to break laws, they already have lots of options available that provide better privacy than Tor provides.... Tor aims to provide protection for ordinary people who want to follow the law. Only criminals have privacy right now, and we need to fix that.... So yes, criminals could in theory use Tor, but they already have better options, and it seems unlikely that taking Tor away from the world will stop them from doing their bad things. At the same time, Tor and other privacy measures can fight identity theft, physical crimes like stalking, and so on."

Uses Tor has been described by The Economist, in relation to Bitcoin and the Silk Road, as being "a dark corner of the web". Tor can be used for anonymous defamation, unauthorized news leaks of sensitive information and copyright infringement, distribution of illegal sexual content, selling controlled substances, weapons, and stolen credit card numbers, money laundering, bank fraud, credit card fraud, identity theft and the exchange of counterfeit currency; the black market utilizes the Tor infrastructure, at least in part, in conjunction with Bitcoin Tor enables users to surf the Internet, chat and send instant messages anonymously, and is used by a wide variety of people for both licit and illicit purposes. Tor has, for example, been used by criminal enterprises, hacktivism groups, and law enforcement agencies at cross purposes, sometimes simultaneously

Weaknesses Researchers from the University of Michigan developed a network scanner allowing identification of 86% of live Tor "bridges" with a single scan Mouse fingerprinting: In March 2016 a security researcher based in Barcelona, Spain demonstrated that laboratory techniques using time measurement via JavaScript at the 1-millisecond level could potentially identify and correlate a user's unique mouse movements provided that the user has visited the same "fingerprinting" website with both the Tor browser and a regular browser. This proof of concept exploits the "time measurement via JavaScript" issue which has been an open ticket on the Tor Project for ten months. Firefox / JavaScript anonymity attack: In August 2013, it was discovered that the Firefox browsers in many older versions of the Tor Browser Bundle were vulnerable to a JavaScript attack, as NoScript was not enabled by default In its complaint against Ross William Ulbricht of the Silk Road, the FBI acknowledged that Tor has "known legitimate uses"

Conclusion Does the US Government support Tor? Yes Does the US Government support 100% anonymous web browsing? No “The only truly secure system is one that is powered off, cast in a block of concrete and sealed in a lead-lined room with armed guards.” – Gene Spafford “If you think technology can solve your security problems, then you don’t understand the problems and you don’t understand the technology.” – Bruce Schneier Julian Assange recently told students at Cambridge the Internet is "not a technology that favors freedom of speech" or "human rights." He added, "Rather it is a technology that can be used to set up a totalitarian spying regime, the likes of which we have never seen.“

sources https://blog.cloudflare.com/content/images/2016/03/Tor-logo- 2011-flat-svg.png http://www.networkworld.com/article/2228873/microsoft- subnet/no-conspiracy-theory-needed--tor-created-for-u-s--gov-t- spying.html https://www.torproject.org/images/htw2.png http://securityaffairs.co/wordpress/wp- content/uploads/2013/10/nsa-tor-hack.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tor_(anonymity_network) https://www.hackread.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/fbi- caught-paedophile-by-infecting-tor-web-browser.jpg