A spy who is the only person using an encrypted network is not hidden. He is the most spectacular person on it.
This single, almost obvious problem is why Tor exists in anything close to its current form. I’ve spent enough time researching structure, security, and control to recognize this pattern the moment I see it: a system built to protect the few only worked because it had to protect everyone, including those its own designers would never have chosen.
This is not a footnote to the story. That’s the whole story, and that’s the part that keeps breaking.
The problem actually had to be solved by American intelligence
In the mid-1990s, researchers at the US Naval Research Laboratory were trying to solve something narrower than “how do we protect privacy.” Their actual question was closer to this: how to prevent a listening adversary from noticing that a message exists, let alone reading it. Encryption encodes content. There is nothing to hide the fact that a signal arrived from a known government address to a specific server at a specific time. This pattern of who is talking to whom is often more telling than the message itself.
David Goldschlag, Michael Reed, and Paul Syverson built a system that routed traffic through layers of encrypted intermediaries so that no point in the network could see the origin and destination of a message at the same time. It’s called onion routing. THE The Tor Project has its own account of its history it’s straight to the point: connections that don’t reveal who’s talking to whom, even if someone’s monitoring the network.
Why does a network built just for spies defeat itself?
Here’s the part that I find really weird, and the part that almost no one repeats when they tell this story. Solving cryptography was not a difficult problem. The hard problem came next.
If only intelligence officers were using this system, they would be reported. Anyone monitoring global traffic patterns can easily mark any connection to this obscure network and spy correctly. A crowd of one person is not a cover. It’s a reflector with extra steps.
I don’t think this is given the weight it deserves. Anonymity is not something built into a wire or algorithm. It’s something that only exists when other people do the same mundane thing you do. This means that the researchers have not yet solved their problem. Just moved.
No one could have foreseen the alliance
So the people who were building an encryption tool for the US government sought out cypherpunks, civil libertarians, and privacy advocates, the very community most likely to mistrust the US government on principle, and invited them into the design process.
I keep coming back to this detail because it’s not ideological bigotry dressed up as an afterthought. According to the detailed report, the MIT Press Readerthe Navy could not even operate the infrastructure itself, because a network clearly tied to the US military would only be trusted by those who already trusted the US military. The device had to look independent because it had to be independent. There was no version of this that operated purely as an internal government project.
The code became public in 2004, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation soon began funding further work by Dingledine and Mathewson. In 2006, the Tor Project was officially established as a non-profit organization. An encrypted research question turned into free software maintained by the same nonprofit ecosystem that now protects the privacy of everyday people.
Where I think the popular version of this story goes wrong
Most retellings of this history land in one of two places. Or a conspiracy (“the government built the dark web to watch you”) or a redemption story (“a military project became a gift to the world”). I don’t buy either framework because they both miss the mechanism that actually explains what happened.
Dissidents, journalists, and casual browsers using Tor are unfortunate bystanders who have accidentally benefited from someone else’s device. They are the tool. Structurally, these are the reasons it works at all, even for the officer it was originally built for. Without a large, mixed, everyday crowd, the system fails in its one original task. So it was never about the intelligence agencies sharing anything generously. The secret services discovered that their invention was mathematically useless unless it was sold.
This is the part that I think almost nobody remembers, and once you see it, you can’t read the rest of the story the same way.
What does this say about who actually gets protection and why?
Frankly, I’m uncomfortable with this pattern because of what it implies about defense more broadly. A dissident in an authoritarian country gains true anonymity in part because a government elsewhere had to provide cover for its own staff. The source-protecting journalist enjoys an infrastructure that exists for reasons that have nothing to do with journalism. No one sat down and decided that these groups deserved protection on their own merits. It was inherited as a side effect of someone else’s need.
This can be disconcerting to anyone who assumes that you do or don’t have a right to privacy as an independent fact. He was never independent here. It was borrowed, depending on the persistent crowd. Reduce that crowd and the most vulnerable users remain exposed, not the intelligence officers.
I don’t think the tension is resolved clearly
I’ll be honest, where does that leave me. It’s tempting to pick a side, either the dark web is a surveillance trap or a triumph of privacy, and defend it. I don’t think any of them hold up.
The precise engineering that allows a source to speak to a journalist without being identified is the same that allows intelligence operations to go unnoticed, and the same that allows marketplaces like Silk Road to operate for years before law enforcement catches up. You cannot keep the parts of the crowd that you approve of and remove the rest. Protection and exposure come from the same mechanism, and pretending otherwise is just a more convenient way of not thinking about it.
Sovereign Mind lens
At Ideapod, we use the so-called framework system the Sovereign Mind to develop exactly this kind of story where the popular version turns out to be missing the mechanism that made it true in the first place.
- Without learning: the assumption that privacy tools and monitoring tools are on opposite sides of the same line. Here the same plan served both, and not by chance, but out of necessity.
- Renovation: to rebuild the habit of asking who actually needed a system before asking who benefits from it now, since these are rarely the same answers.
- Protection: to resist any simplified version of this story that is easier to repeat: “the government spied on you” or “the government gave you a gift” when both are true and neither is the point.
Why I think it still matters
This is not browser trivia. It’s a useful test of how we think about independence more broadly, about how much of what protects the ability to communicate freely is built on us versus built around us as an inevitable side effect.
Most people who value privacy today didn’t get it because someone decided that ordinary people deserved anonymous communications. They got it because a narrow military research problem happened to require exactly the same thing. I don’t think that’s cynical. I think that clarifies it and clarifies it in a way that makes us less sentimental about how long it all lasts. Infrastructure built as a side effect of someone else can be undone the moment someone else’s needs change.
A final reflection
The part worth keeping is not that intelligence agencies built Tor. The tool only works because it no longer belongs to them – the moment it stopped being solely theirs, it began to do its job.
I always think of privacy as a personal setting, something you enable or configure. It rarely works that way in practice. It depends on who else is with you, whether they can stay, and whether you’re willing to accept that the protection you want for yourself only exists because it extends to people you’d rather not. This is the messed up version. This is also the real thing.
