Document outlines TOR's origins and use by whistleblowers, criminals, and intelligence agencies

71 anonymous. So, to evade this built-in transparency in the Internet, dark side users have come to rely on ingenious software to hide their IP address. The most commonly used software for this purpose is TOR. It was first called The Onion Router, since it moves IP addresses through multiple layers, but it quickly became known simply by its acronym, TOR. TOR software hides the IP address by routing messages through a network of TOR-enabled relay stations, called “nodes.” Each node further obscure the user’s IP, even from the next node in the network. This scrambling allows messages to exit the chain of TOR nodes without an easily discoverable IP. By doing so, it “anomizes” each user of the dark side. Because of the anonymity it provides, TOR became the software of choice for individuals and organization who wanted to hide their identity. For example, TOR software made possible Silk Road, which acted as an exchange for drug dealers, assassins, safe crackers, and prostitutes until it was closed down by the FBI in 2011. It was created by Ross Ulbricht, a libertarian who wore a Ron Paul t-shirt, “to create a website where people could buy anything anonymously, with no trail whatsoever that led back to them.” (Ulbricht received a life prison sentence for running this criminal enterprise in May 2015.) To eradicate the Internet trail, Silk Road employed TOR software. TOR was also employed to steal and transfer classified secrets by Private Bradley Manning (now called Chelsea Manning.) He used TOR software to transfer some 50,000 diplomatic cables and military reports from his laptop to Julian Assange’s Wikileaks website. Eventually Manning was identified by a fellow hacker, convicted by a military court for violations of the Espionage Act, and sentenced to 35 years in prison. TOR enabled Wikileaks to publish other secret data, such as the theft of Sony’s files allegedly by the North Korean intelligence service in 2015. It was the means for guaranteeing anonymity to the IT workers who responded to his by now famous clarion call “System admins of the world unite.” It allowed system administrators who opposed the “surveillance state,” as well as other disgruntled employees of government agencies or corporation, to send documents they copied to the Wikileaks website without revealing their IP addresses. Since Wikileaks did not know the identity of their sources, they could not be legally compelled to reveal them. "Tor's importance to WikiLeaks cannot be overstated," Assange said in an interview with Ro/ling Stone in 2010. Indeed without the anonymity provided by its TOR software, Wikileaks could not have easily entered into a document-sharing arrangement major newspapers, including the Guardian, New York Times, Der Spiegel, Le Monde and El Pais. Through the magic of TOR, these newspapers simply attribute their sources to Wikileaks which, in turn, made Assange a major force in international journalism/. Ironically, TOR originally was a creation of US intelligence. In the early 2000s, the US Naval Research Laboratory and the Defense Advance Research Project Agency (DARPA) developed it to allow US intelligence operatives to cloak their movements on the Internet. They could anonymously manipulate web sites operated by Islamic radicals, for example, and create their own Trojan Horse sites to lures would-be terrorists and spies. As it turned out, that use of TOR HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_020223