The Dark Web Hides Criminals. The US Navy Built It — to Protect Spies.

Key Takeaways

• •Three NRL mathematicians invented onion routing in 1995 for US intelligence communications
• •Tor was released as open source in 2002 — the Navy realized anonymity only works with many users
• •Silk Road processed over $1.2 billion in Bitcoin before the FBI shut it down in 2013
• •Over 2 million people use Tor daily — journalists, activists, and yes, criminals
• •The Tor Project receives funding from the US government while simultaneously frustrating its surveillance

ROOT

In 1995, deep inside the US Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) in Washington, DC, three mathematicians were working on a problem that sounded paradoxical: how does a spy communicate over the internet without anyone knowing they\'re a spy? The internet, by design, is transparent. Every data packet carries its origin and destination addresses in the clear. Internet service providers, governments, and anyone who can tap a cable can see who is talking to whom, even if they can\'t read the content. For intelligence operatives, this metadata is as dangerous as the message itself.

Paul Syverson, Michael Reed, and David Goldschlag devised a solution they called onion routing. The concept was deceptively elegant: take a message, encrypt it in multiple layers — like the layers of an onion — and send it through a chain of relay servers. Each relay peels off exactly one layer of encryption, revealing only the address of the next relay. No single relay ever knows both the original sender and the final destination. The first relay knows who sent the message but not where it\'s going. The last relay knows the destination but not who sent it. The relays in the middle know nothing except which relay to forward to next.

The mathematics were sound, but the concept had a fatal operational flaw that the NRL researchers recognized immediately. If only US intelligence operatives used the onion routing network, then the mere act of using it would identify someone as a US intelligence operative. Every connection entering the network would be flagged as suspicious. Anonymity requires a crowd to hide in. The Navy\'s spy tool was useless unless civilians used it too.

This is the paradox that shaped the entire history of anonymous communication technology: the government needed to give away its spy tool to make it work.

Development continued through the late 1990s with funding from DARPA (the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency — the same agency that funded the creation of the internet itself). The NRL built prototype onion routing networks and published their research openly, deliberately making the technology available to the academic community. In 2000, Syverson recruited Roger Dingledine, a recent MIT graduate who had worked on anonymous communication systems, and Nick Mathewson, another MIT computer scientist. Together, they redesigned the onion routing protocol from scratch, improving its security, performance, and usability.

In 2002, they released Tor — The Onion Router — as free, open-source software. The code was available for anyone to inspect, modify, and run. In 2004, the NRL released the Tor source code under a free license, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) began funding Dingledine and Mathewson\'s work. In 2006, they incorporated The Tor Project as a nonprofit organization. The US Navy had literally given away its surveillance-evasion tool to the world — and continued to fund it, because the more people who used Tor, the better it worked for intelligence purposes.

This is not conspiracy. It\'s public record. The Tor Project has always been transparent about its origins. Through 2025, the US government remained one of Tor\'s largest funders — a fact that creates perpetual tension and suspicion, and a fact that the Tor Project addresses directly in its financial disclosures.

TODAY

Tor has between 2 and 3 million daily users worldwide in 2025. The vast majority are not criminals. They are ordinary people seeking privacy, citizens of authoritarian regimes accessing uncensored information, and journalists protecting their sources. The reality of Tor usage contradicts its popular image as a gateway to the "dark web."

SecureDrop, an open-source whistleblower submission system built on Tor, is used by over 70 major news organizations including the New York Times, the Washington Post, The Guardian, the BBC, and ProPublica. Without Tor, sources like Edward Snowden could not have communicated with journalists safely. In countries like Iran, China, and Russia, Tor is often the only way to access blocked websites, independent media, and communication tools. During the 2022 Mahsa Amini protests in Iran, Tor usage in the country spiked as the government shut down internet access — Tor\'s bridge relays provided a lifeline.

Then there is the dark web — the part of the internet accessible only through Tor\'s .onion hidden services. Silk Road, the first major dark web marketplace, launched in February 2011. Founded by Ross Ulbricht (operating under the name "Dread Pirate Roberts"), Silk Road used Tor for anonymity and Bitcoin for payments to create an eBay-style marketplace for illegal drugs. At its peak, Silk Road had over 13,000 listings and processed an estimated $1.2 billion in transactions. The FBI shut it down in October 2013 and arrested Ulbricht, who received a double life sentence. Successors — AlphaBay, Hansa, Dream Market — followed the same pattern: rise, attract users, get taken down by law enforcement.

The broader privacy ecosystem that Tor pioneered is now massive. Signal, the encrypted messaging app used by journalists, activists, and increasingly by ordinary consumers, incorporates onion-routing principles in its sealed sender feature. The global VPN market — worth over $44 billion by 2025 — owes a direct conceptual debt to the anonymity research that produced Tor. Services like NordVPN, ExpressVPN, and Mullvad all address the same fundamental problem: hiding internet traffic from surveillance. Apple\'s iCloud Private Relay uses a two-hop architecture that is essentially simplified onion routing for Safari traffic.

Governments are locked in a perpetual arms race with anonymity technology. China\'s Great Firewall actively identifies and blocks Tor connections. Russia has attempted to block Tor since 2021. Iran deploys deep packet inspection to detect Tor traffic. The Tor Project responds with pluggable transports — tools that disguise Tor traffic as ordinary web browsing, making it harder to detect and block. It is a cat-and-mouse game with no end in sight, and the stakes are the ability of billions of people to communicate without surveillance.

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