An Onion for Uncle Sam: The Unlikely Naval Project That Built the Anonymous Internet

To protect its spies online, the U.S. Navy created a powerful anonymizing tool. The only problem? A network of only spies is easy to spot. Their radical solution was to release it to the world, creating the foundation for the anonymous web we know today.

Technology & Innovation Military Technology & Strategy Media & Censorship

An Unlikely Architect

When most people picture the origins of the anonymous web, they might imagine rogue cypherpunks in a dimly lit basement, not the sterile corridors of a U.S. government defense lab. Yet the core technology that powers Tor, the world’s most famous anonymity network, was born at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory (NRL). In the mid-1990s, the internet was still in its adolescence, and for American intelligence agencies, its transparency was a liability. Every digital communication left a trail, making it perilously easy for adversaries to identify and monitor agents. The Navy needed a way for its operatives to communicate online without revealing who they were or where they were connecting from.

The Onion Has Layers

The solution, developed by NRL computer scientists Paul Syverson, Michael Reed, and David Goldschlag, was a system they called “onion routing.” The concept was as elegant as its namesake. A piece of data would be wrapped in multiple layers of strong encryption. This digital “onion” was then relayed through a decentralized, volunteer-run network of computers around the world. At each stop, or node, a single layer of encryption was “peeled” away to reveal the location of the next node. By the time the data reached its final destination, its path was completely obscured. The exit node knew where the data was going, but not where it came from. The entry node knew where it came from, but not its ultimate destination. The original message was delivered in perfect secrecy.

The goal was to make internet traffic untraceable. By wrapping communications in layers of encryption and routing them through a distributed network, the path from sender to receiver would become a cryptographic maze.

The Anonymity Catch-22

The technology worked beautifully, but it immediately ran into a fundamental paradox. Imagine building a top-secret hideout accessible only by a secret door. If the only people who ever use that door are spies, the door itself becomes a beacon. It practically screams “SPY HIDEOUT HERE.” The onion routing network faced the same problem. If its only users were U.S. intelligence agents, then any traffic detected on that network was, by definition, U.S. intelligence traffic. Their perfect cloak of anonymity had inadvertently become a uniform.

Hiding in the Crowd

The researchers realized that to achieve true anonymity, their spies couldn't be the only ones in the room. They needed a crowd to get lost in. The network required a massive and diverse user base—journalists, activists, corporations, and everyday citizens from all over the world—to generate so much “cover” traffic that the spies’ communications would become statistically invisible, like a single grain of sand on a vast beach. The only way to save their secret government project was to give it away.

A Shield for the People

In 2002, the NRL published the code for its second-generation onion router. By 2004, they released it under a free and open-source license. With early funding from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, developers like Roger Dingledine and Nick Mathewson took the reins, eventually forming The Tor Project, a standalone nonprofit, in 2006. The tool built to protect state secrets had been successfully handed over to the public. In doing so, the Pentagon inadvertently created one of the most powerful instruments for challenging state power. Today, Tor is a critical shield for dissidents organizing under authoritarian regimes, for journalists protecting their sources from retribution, and for ordinary people reclaiming their right to privacy in an age of ubiquitous surveillance. It remains a profound and enduring irony: the technology forged to hide spies now empowers the very people who hold them accountable.

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