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The Spy Tool They Had to Give Away

The United States Navy built a way to hide its agents online, then realized it only worked if everyone else used it too. The story of how a military secret became the browser of activists, journalists, and criminals alike.

10 chapters · 12 sourcesBy AndrewPublished October 12, 2026

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Mid-1990s

The Watchers on the Wire

Mid-1990s internet booming, privacy an afterthought
Encryption hides content, not who talks to whom
Metadata enables traffic analysis

Ada: It's the mid-nineties, and the internet is this new, dazzling, wide-open thing. Everyone's rushing online, and almost nobody's thinking about who might be watching.

Theo: And people are watching?

Ada: Every connection you make leaves a trail on the wire. Now, encryption was starting to appear, SSL and the like, and that scrambles what you say.

Theo: So my message is safe.

Ada: The contents, yes. But not who you're talking to, or when, or how often. That's the metadata, and someone watching the cables can map your whole circle of contacts without reading a single word.

Theo: Huh. So the envelope gives you away even if the letter's sealed.

Ada: That's it exactly. And welcome, by the way, this is Historai, I'm Ada.

Theo: And I'm Theo. Today, how a military secret became the browser of activists and criminals alike.

Ada: And for one particular organization, that envelope problem wasn't academic. It was dangerous.

c. 1995 CE

Three Men at the Navy Lab

US Naval Research Laboratory, Washington DC
Paul Syverson, Michael Reed, David Goldschlag
Work began around 1995-96, to protect US intel comms

Ada: The organization is the United States Navy, specifically the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington. Picture a mathematician and two computer scientists with a very particular headache.

Theo: Which was?

Ada: Imagine you're a US intelligence officer, and you want to gather openly available information online. The moment you connect to a Navy server, you've revealed that the link exists.

Theo: Right, the connection itself is the tell.

Ada: The three men were Paul Syverson, the mathematician, and computer scientists Michael Reed and David Goldschlag. Accounts differ on exactly when they started, around nineteen ninety-five or ninety-six.

Theo: And this is for spies, full stop? Not for, you know, protecting dissidents?

Ada: Not at this point. The goal was to protect US government and intelligence communications, to let agents look around online without broadcasting that they were US government.

Theo: So it starts as a pure spycraft tool.

Ada: Entirely. The irony of who ends up using it is still years away. For now, three men have to solve one puzzle: how do you talk to a server without anyone being able to prove you did?

c. 1996 CE

Peeling the Onion

Message wrapped in nested layers of encryption
Routed through three relays: entry, middle, exit
No single relay knows both sender and destination

Ada: Here's their idea. You don't send your message straight to the destination. You wrap it in layers of encryption, one inside another.

Theo: Layers, like an onion.

Ada: Precisely, and that's where the name comes from. Then you send it bouncing through a chain of relays, usually three. An entry relay, a middle one, and an exit.

Theo: And each relay does what?

Ada: Each one peels off exactly one layer of encryption. And that layer tells it only two things: where the message just came from, and where to send it next.

Theo: So no single relay sees the whole journey.

Ada: That's the heart of it. The entry relay knows who you are but not where you're going. The exit relay knows the destination but not who you are.

Theo: And the middle one just knows it's passing a parcel between two strangers.

Ada: You've got it. The exit relay makes the final request to the website, so as far as that site is concerned, the traffic comes from the exit, not from you. The path is shredded into pieces nobody can reassemble alone.

c. 2000 CE

Patent and Proof

DARPA funding from 1997
US Navy patents onion routing, 2001
First generation: fragile single-machine prototype

Ada: By nineteen ninety-seven, DARPA is funding the work, and in two thousand one the Navy actually patents onion routing. US patent number six million, two hundred sixty-six thousand, seven hundred and four.

Theo: The Navy patented it? That's oddly corporate for a spy project.

Ada: It is. But the first generation was really just a proof of concept, running on a single machine. Experimental, fragile, nothing you'd hand to the public.

Theo: So it worked in the lab but barely.

Ada: Right. And that's when Syverson runs into a problem that no amount of clever engineering can fix. A problem about crowds.

c. 2001 CE

Anonymity Loves Company

A network used only by spies exposes spies
'Anonymity loves company' - Syverson's insight
Hiding the few required a crowd of ordinary users

Ada: So think about who's on this network. If it's only the Navy, if every single user is a US intelligence officer, what does that tell an observer?

Theo: That anyone using it is... the Navy.

Ada: Anyone using it is the Navy. The traffic lights up like a flare. You've built this beautiful system to hide the path, and the mere fact that you're on the system gives you away.

Theo: Oh, that's a brutal catch. You can't hide in a crowd of one.

Ada: That's Syverson's insight, and there's a line that captures it perfectly. Anonymity loves company.

Theo: Meaning the more different kinds of people on it, the safer each one is.

Ada: The safer every one of them is. A spy, a journalist, a bored teenager, a grandmother checking her email, if they're all mixed together, you can't pick out the spy anymore.

Theo: So to hide its own people, the government needs ordinary people. Lots of them.

Ada: A large, diverse crowd. And there is only one way to get that crowd.

Theo: Don't tell me.

Ada: You give the tool away. To everyone. Journalists, activists, criminals, anyone on earth who wants it. The Navy's secret weapon only works if it stops being a secret.

Theo: That is genuinely one of the strangest trade-offs I've ever heard.

Ada: And they understood it clearly. The only way to protect the few was to arm the many. So the Navy realized it had to hand its weapon to the entire world.

c. 2004 CE

Tor Goes Public

2002: Dingledine and Mathewson join Syverson
2004: landmark USENIX paper, code open-sourced
2006: The Tor Project nonprofit founded, EFF funding

Ada: So in two thousand two, a new generation takes shape. Two MIT graduates, Roger Dingledine and Nick Mathewson, join Syverson.

Theo: And this is where the name Tor shows up?

Ada: It is. It comes from The Onion Router. Though the project is firm that it's not an acronym, it's not spelled T-O-R in capitals, it's just Tor.

Theo: A name, not initials. Noted.

Ada: Then two thousand four is the landmark. They publish a paper called Tor: The Second-Generation Onion Router at the USENIX conference, and they release the code as free, open-source software.

Theo: So the Navy actually lets go of it.

Ada: The Naval Research Laboratory releases it, and then the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights group, steps in to fund it. And in two thousand six, The Tor Project becomes a nonprofit in its own right.

Theo: From classified prototype to charity in about a decade.

Ada: And once it's out in the wild, people start building things with it the inventors never quite pictured.

c. 2004 CE

Addresses That Hide Their Home

Onion services from 2004: '.onion' addresses
Server location hidden, both ends anonymous
Press later dubbed it 'the dark web'

Ada: One of those things, also from two thousand four, is what they called onion services. Websites that live only inside the network.

Theo: Inside the network? Not on the regular internet at all?

Ada: Not reachable the normal way. They have special addresses ending in dot onion, and the clever part is the server's location is hidden too.

Theo: So before, only the visitor was anonymous. Now the site is as well.

Ada: Both ends anonymous. You can't trace the visitor, and you can't find where the server physically sits.

Theo: That's the thing the press later started calling the dark web.

Ada: That's where the term comes from. And it cuts both ways, which is really the whole story of Tor. For a journalist in a country that jails reporters, a hidden server is a lifeline, somewhere to publish that can't be raided.

Theo: And for someone with worse intentions, the same invisibility.

Ada: The same invisibility exactly. Which brings us to the two faces of this thing, side by side.

2011-2013 CE

Whistleblowers and Contraband

Used in the Arab Spring, 2010-11; Snowden leaks, 2013
Silk Road drug market, launched by Ross Ulbricht Feb 2011
FBI seized it Oct 2013; Ulbricht arrested in a library

Ada: Start with the shining side. When protests swept the Arab world in twenty ten and twenty eleven, Tor helped people get around government censorship and organize.

Theo: The Arab Spring.

Ada: That's it. And then in twenty thirteen, the biggest example of all. Edward Snowden used Tor as part of leaking the National Security Agency's files to journalists.

Theo: Hang on. A tool the US government built, used to leak the US government's own secrets?

Ada: The very same. A navy invention protecting the man exposing American surveillance. You couldn't script it.

Theo: And the dark side you mentioned?

Ada: In February twenty eleven, a man named Ross Ulbricht launches an online marketplace called Silk Road, running as a dot onion hidden service. Mostly drugs, bought and sold anonymously, paid in cryptocurrency.

Theo: And he's got some alias, I assume.

Ada: Dread Pirate Roberts, borrowed from the film. For a couple of years it's enormous. Then in October twenty thirteen the FBI seizes the site.

Theo: How'd they get him?

Ada: Old-fashioned detective work, not by breaking Tor. They arrested him in a public library in San Francisco, with his laptop open and logged in, so they could grab it before he could encrypt it.

Theo: Caught at the keyboard. So the tech held, the human slipped.

Ada: That's the pattern again and again. The same tool shields a whistleblower and a drug lord, which makes you ask the obvious thing. Can anyone actually crack it?

2007-2013 CE

Tor Stinks

2007: Dan Egerstad's exit nodes harvested ~100 gov logins
Exit nodes read unencrypted content, not the path
NSA's leaked 'Tor Stinks' slide admitted limits

Ada: So, can it be cracked? Here's a telling case from two thousand seven. A Swedish researcher, Dan Egerstad, ran five exit nodes of his own.

Theo: The last hop, the one that talks to the website.

Ada: Right. And he harvested the logins of around a hundred embassy and government email accounts. Because Tor hides the path, but if you send your password in plain, unencrypted text, the exit node can read it.

Theo: So that's not Tor failing, that's people being sloppy at the far end.

Ada: Precisely. Tor protects the route, not careless content. Now the big one. The NSA, around twenty twelve, made an internal slide titled Tor Stinks, which leaked in twenty thirteen.

Theo: The NSA complaining in a slide deck. Amazing.

Ada: They admitted they couldn't de-anonymize all users all the time. By their own account only a small fraction could be unmasked, and exact figures were never made public.

Theo: So what is the real weakness?

Ada: Someone powerful enough to watch both ends at once, the entry and the exit, and match the timing of the traffic. A correlation attack. Tor added entry guards to make that harder.

Present day

The Crowd That Keeps the Secret

Still partly funded by US government money
Written 'Tor', not an acronym
The paradox endures: safety in a shared crowd

Ada: And to this day, here's the knot that never unties. Tor is still partly funded by US government money, while being used all over the world to dodge governments.

Theo: So when you line it up, the Navy builds a way to hide spies, then realizes it can't hide them alone.

Ada: So it gives the tool to the whole planet, and that crowd is exactly what still protects the original spies today. The paradox from the start never went away, it became the whole design.

Theo: There's something almost human in that. You stay safe by being one of many, not one apart.

Ada: That's the lesson that outlasts all the cryptography. Privacy isn't a wall you build alone, it's a crowd you join.

Theo: And if any of this sparked a question while you were listening, you can stop us anytime and just ask.

Ada: This was Historai, where history answers back.

Research record