Sensational news just shook whole Internet! The beloved TOR (The Onion Router) Project is actually a Government Trojan! Or maybe not. Could it be another example of planted fake news? Read to the end of text…

A Russian-born American investigative journalist, Yasha Levine, claims he has a ton of proofs that the Tor Project, hailed as a bulwark against the encroaching surveillance state, has received funding from US government agency the BBG and cooperates with intelligence agencies. He allegedly obtained 2,500 pages of correspondence about the project via Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests.

The Tor Project, a private non-profit that underpins the dark web and enjoys cult status among privacy activists, is almost 100% funded by the US government. In the process of writing my book Surveillance Valley, I was able to obtain via FOIA roughly 2,500 pages of correspondence — including strategy and contracts and budgets and status updates — between the Tor Project and its main funder, a CIA spinoff now known as the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG). These files show incredible cooperation between Tor and the regime change wing of the US government.

—Yasha Levine

Duration: 3:42

Now, before you start panicking and throw TOR in disappointment, take a deep breath and think. If I am a government official who want to reduce the use of anonymous browser, what would I have to do? Yes, discredit it! Make up a bunch of documents and then and then declare it to the whole World as soon as possible. How can we do that? We have to find a “credible” source. Oh, look, this guy has just wrote a book on surveillance, and he is a Russian by origin!

Yes, Yasha Levine is the author of Surveillance Valley, a book about the secret military history of the Internet, that just hit bookshelves this February, 2018. Can you imagine a better ad?

And then… Does a word from a CIA renegade means something to you?

Tor is a critical technology, not just in terms of privacy protection, but in defense of our publication right -- our ability to route around censorship and ensure that when people speak their voices can be heard. The design of the Tor system is structured in such a way that even if the US Government wanted to subvert it, it couldn't because it's a decentralized authority. It's a volunteer based network. Nobody's getting paid to run Tor relays — they're volunteers worldwide. And because of this, it provides a built-in structural defense against abuses and most types of adversaries. Tor provides a level of safety, a level of guarantee, to the confidentiality, and in some cases anonymity of human communications. I think this is an incredible thing because it makes us more human. We are at the greatest peace with ourselves when nobody's watching.

—Edward Snowden

OK, you may consider Snowden a fake. Planted guy who revealed 5% so he could hide a 95%. And you consider Julian Assange an Imperial spy also? Well, then you can take the source code and rewrite “the Government backdoor”, because you know… TOR is an open source since early years of this Century!

I really don't have any intention to give you an explicit conclusion, but rather a platform for some thinking exercise.

What's your take on this affair?