Tor Project raises $200,000 with fundraiser

The Tor Project has raised more than $200,000 with its first crowdfunding campaign. The organization wanted to be less dependent on government funding, with the United States government accounting for the lion’s share.

In total, the organization raked in $205,874, at the time of writing about $190,000, from 5,265 donations in six weeks. It is still possible to donate to the Tor Project, but the six-week campaign has ended.

Tor, which stands for The Onion Router, is a network based on a technique called onion routing. The system was developed in the mid-1990s by the United States Naval Research Laboratory. Via the Tor network, all the tcp traffic of users is routed through various Tor routers, after which it is virtually impossible for the receiver to determine who the original sender was.

Recently, for example, Facebook added the option to have all traffic run through the Tor network from its own Android app. The advantage of this is that, if no exit node is needed, the traffic remains within the Tor network and the chance of discovering where the user is located is virtually nil.

Tor recently announced that its budget has been around $2.5 million per year for several years now. Servers are maintained for this purpose and about twenty people are kept in permanent employment. Volunteers do most of the work. In 2014, about 75 percent of the subsidies came from the US government. This makes the crowdfunding campaign especially useful to increase visibility.