Who created Tor, and how is the network funded and kept resilient?

Tor grew out of US Naval Research Laboratory work in the mid-1990s and is, as of the 2025 course, a global open-source project running on roughly 8,000 volunteer relays, funded by donations and grants.

Origin: developed in the mid-1990s at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory by Paul Syverson, Michael Reed, and David Goldschlag, originally to protect intelligence communications. It has since become an open-source project for digital human rights.

Why it resists shutdown:

• The network consists of ~8,000 relay servers run by thousands of independent volunteers and NGOs worldwide.
• Because operators are spread across the globe with no central authority, the network is nearly impossible to switch off or corrupt.

Funding: relay hardware and electricity are donated by the operators themselves; the Tor Project's software development is funded by private donations, NGOs (such as Mozilla), and project grants for Internet freedom.

Tip: The "no central point" design is the whole reason censorship-resistance works — you can't behead a network that has no head.

Go deeper:

• Tor (network) (Wikipedia) — the NRL origin, Syverson/Reed/Goldschlag, and the volunteer-relay model.