Sida’s mission is to help individuals living under oppression so they can improve their lives. In 2017, a Swedish government agency, Sida – Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency, provided $600,000. There are other government-backed agencies around the world funding Tor. Private donations now make up roughly 49% of Tor’s funding. (The US government financed 80 to 90 percent of Tor’s expenses in 2015.) The success of this and subsequent fundraisers meant that by 2017, US government contributions fell to just over 50 percent in 2017. Still, Tor seemed convinced that, while perhaps they weren’t paid, the university researchers did aid the FBI in helping to de-anonymize Tor, and called the law enforcement/university relationship a “troubling precedent.”Īfter the privacy debacle, The Tor Project held fundraisers in 2015 seeking outside donations. If the FBI had managed to crack Tor, many innocent users would have suffered as well.
While they did manage to compromise the anonymity of some users, it appears they didn’t get much farther than that. The FBI allegedly did this to stop the spread of child pornography. The FBI paid Carnegie Mellon researchers $1 million to find a way to stop Tor, a claim that the researchers later denied.
A major factor in Tor’s decision to step away from government reliance was the FBI’s decision to try to “crack” Tor. This shows us how many people rely on Tor for safe and secure Internet browsing.ĭata showed how it was diversifying its donation sources and slowly stepping away from government grants. The Tor Project revealed it received donations from 115 countries across the globe. An anonymous individual also matched all new donations up to $20,000. Mozilla pledged to match donations until the end of 2018. Tor got this far thanks to contributions by Mozilla, another open source software organization. All of this was possible due to an increase in donations from outside of the US government. The company also indicated in recently released financial records that it raised a record $4.13 million from all sources in 2017. (Tor was originally created by the US military.) This will allow them to rely less on US government funds. The Tor Project, makers of the Tor private browser, just announced a record number of donations from individual users in their 2018 funding campaign which totaled $460,000.
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