Tor received $1.8 million in US federal funds last year, while the NSA tried to crack it

One arm of the US government may be trying to crack Tor, but another arm is handing Tor money — a lot of it. As spotted by the Guardian, the anonymous browsing tool Tor is reporting that it received over $1.8 million in federal funds last year, a figure that’s gone up 50 percent from 2012. It’s ironic news, as the NSA and other intelligence organizations have been attempting to undermine Tor, which is generally able to hide the tracks of someone who uses it while browsing the web.

Most of Tor’s funding didn’t come straight from the US government, however. While it received over $1.8 million in federal funds, much of that was handed out through third parties. Two donors, the nonprofits SRI International and Internews Network, contributed the bulk of the funds, accounting for close to $1.4 million of them. Most of those funds originated from the Department of Defense. While the DoD didn’t hand any funding over directly, another government agency did: just over a quarter million was given to Tor from the US State Department.