🚨🇺🇸 THE NAVY’S SECRET SPY TOOL THAT ACCIDENTALLY BECAME THE INTERNET’S PRIVACY PARTY In the 1990s at the U.S. Naval Research Lab, three military researchers were stuck on a problem. Spies and military personnel needed the internet to communicate, but the metadata was giving them away. Encryption could hide the words. It could not hide who was talking to whom. Their answer was onion routing. Wrap the routing data in three layers of encryption, bounce it across servers scattered around the world, and peel off one layer at each stop. No single server could see the full conversation trail. Think of it like a relay race where each runner only knows who handed them the baton and who to give it to next. One problem remained. Anonymity is useless without a crowd. If only spies used the network, it might as well have been labeled “Secret Agent Express.” So the Navy did something unexpected. They brought in cypherpunks, the anti-establishment hackers who dreamed of using encryption to shrink corporate and state power. Over plates of vegetarian lasagna and roasted onions, the two sides agreed to make the system open to everyone. Everyday users would give cover to the high-risk ones. The creation was Tor - a network built for spies, embraced by activists, journalists, and anyone who values privacy. Today, the same governments that helped birth it keep trying to weaken it in the name of safety. That is like giving the public a set of armor and then filing it down to make it “less dangerous.” Source: MIT Press Reader