HISTORY OF TOR AND. WHY IT WAS CREATED ?

TOR is one of the most commonly used software to access the Dark Web. It is almost a fail-proof way of being anonymous. The history of Tor is quite interesting, and it can help people to understand why the need of Tor arose and why it is still relevant.

It will come as a surprise that the roots of Tor can be traced back to the United States Naval Research Lab. Employees of the above organization viz. Syverson, Reed and Goldschlag researched ways to protect the intelligence communication in the mid-90s. This was the beginning of Onion routing. Onion routing then moved on to DARPA, and it was enhanced there in the late 90s.

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Syverson along with Mathewson and Dingledine launched the alpha version of Tor on 20th September 2002. It was then known as The Onion Routing project. A public version was released the next year.

A turning point in the history of Tor was when Mathewson, Dingledine, and others created Tor Project in 2006. A non-profit organization runs and maintains Tor. It is a surprising fact that some of the early financiers of the project were Internews, Google, and University of Cambridge, US. International Broadcasting Bureau etc. It also received monetary support from Human Rights Watch. Nowadays, the US government supports the Tor Project financially.

So, the Navy created Tor, to hide/protect governmental communications. The purpose has not changed a lot since then, however, the user circle has expanded and now common people like us can use it to safeguard our privacy as well.

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