Surveillance Valley

by Yasha Levine

  In 2002, the pair went to work for the Naval Research Laboratory under a DARPA contract.14 For two years, Dingledine and Mathewson worked with Syverson to upgrade the onion router network’s underlying routing protocols, improve security, and run a small test network that allowed the military to experiment with onion routing in the field. One military team tested it for gathering open source intelligence, which required them to visit websites and interact with people online without giving away their identity. Another team used it to communicate while deployed on a mission in the Middle East.15 By 2004, Tor, the resultant network, was finally ready for deployment.16 Well, except for one little detail.

  Everyone working on the project understood that a system that merely anonymized traffic was not enough—not if it was used exclusively by military and intelligence agencies. “The United States government can’t simply run an anonymity system for everybody and then use it themselves only,” Dingledine explained at a 2004 computer conference in Berlin. “Because then every time a connection came from it people would say, ‘Oh, it’s another CIA agent.’ If those are the only people using the network.”17

  To truly hide spies and soldiers, Tor needed to distance itself from its Pentagon roots and include as many different users as possible. Activists, students, corporate researchers, soccer moms, journalists, drug dealers, hackers, child pornographers, agents of foreign intelligence services, terrorists. Tor was like a public square—the bigger and more diverse the group assembled there, the better spies could hide in the crowd.

  In 2004, Dingledine struck out on his own, spinning the military onion routing project into a nonprofit corporation called the Tor Project and, while still funded by DARPA and the navy, began scratching around for private funding.18 He got help from an unexpected ally: the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), which gave Tor almost a quarter million dollars to keep it going while Dingledine looked for other private sponsors.19 The EFF even hosted Tor’s website. To download the app, users had to browse to tor.eff.org, where they’d see a reassuring message from the EFF: “Your traffic is safer when you use Tor.”20

  Announcing its support, the EFF sang Tor’s praises. “The Tor project is a perfect fit for EFF, because one of our primary goals is to protect the privacy and anonymity of Internet users. Tor can help people exercise their First Amendment right to free, anonymous speech online,” EFF’s technology manager Chris Palmer explained in a 2004 press release, which curiously failed to mention that Tor was developed primarily for military and intelligence use and was still actively funded by the Pentagon.21

  Why would the EFF, a Silicon Valley advocacy group that positioned itself as a staunch critic of government surveillance programs, help sell a military intelligence communications tool to unsuspecting Internet users? Well, it wasn’t as strange as it seems.

  EFF was only a decade old at the time, but it already had developed a history of working with law enforcement agencies and aiding the military. In 1994, EFF worked with the FBI to pass the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act, which required all telecommunications companies to build their equipment so that it could be wiretapped by the FBI.22 In 1999, EFF worked to support NATO’s bombing campaign in Kosovo with something called the “Kosovo Privacy Project,” which aimed to keep the region’s Internet access open during military action.23 Selling a Pentagon intelligence project as a grassroots privacy tool—it didn’t seem all that wild. Indeed, in 2002, a few years before it funded Tor, EFF cofounder Perry Barlow casually admitted that he had been consulting for intelligence agencies for a decade.24 It seemed that the worlds of soldiers, spies, and privacy weren’t as far apart as they appeared.

  EFF’s support for Tor was a big deal. The organization commanded respect in Silicon Valley and was widely seen as the ACLU of the Internet Age. The fact that it backed Tor meant that no hard questions would be asked about the anonymity tool’s military origins as it transitioned to the civilian world. And that’s exactly what happened.25

  Freedom Isn’t Free

  It was Wednesday morning, February 8, 2006, when Roger Dingledine got the email he had been badly waiting for. The Broadcasting Board of Governors had finally agreed to back the Tor Project.

  “OK—we want to move forward on this, Roger. We would like to offer some funding,” wrote Ken Berman, director of the Broadcasting Board of Governors’ Internet Technology unit. “For this first effort, we were going to offer $80,000 to you, with more possibly depending on how things evolve. Give us the particulars for how to establish a contractual relationship with you, name business contact information.”26

  It had been two years since Dingledine had made Tor independent, and his time in the wild world of private donors and civilian nonprofits hadn’t been very successful.27 Other than the initial funding from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Dingledine didn’t raise money from the private sector, at least not enough to fund the operation.

  The Broadcasting Board of Governors, or BBG, seemed to offer a compromise. A large federal agency with close ties to the State Department, the BBG ran America’s foreign broadcasting operations: Voice of America, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, and Radio Free Asia. It was a government agency, so that wasn’t ideal. But at least it had an altruistic-sounding mission: “to inform, engage and connect people around the world in support of freedom and democracy.” Anyway, government or not, Dingledine didn’t have much choice. Money was tight and this seemed to be the best he could line up. So he said yes.

  It was a smart move. The initial $80,000 was just the beginning. Within a year, the agency increased Tor’s contract to a quarter million dollars and then bumped it up again to almost a million just a few years later. The relationship also led to major contracts with other federal agencies, boosting Tor’s meager operating budget to several million dollars a year.28

  Dingledine should have been celebrating, but something nagged at his conscience.

  Immediately after signing the contract, he emailed Ken Berman, his contact at the BBG, to tell him he was worried about the optics of the deal.29 Dingledine wanted to do everything he could to maintain Tor’s independent image, but as head of a tax-exempt nonprofit that received funding from the federal government, he was required by law to publicly disclose his funding sources and publish financial audits. He knew that whether he liked it or not, Tor’s relationship with the federal government would come out sooner or later. “We also need to think about a strategy for how to spin this move in terms of Tor’s overall direction. I would guess that we don’t want to loudly declare war on China, since this only harms our goals?” he wrote. “But we also don’t want to hide the existence of funding from [the BBG], since ‘they’re getting paid off by the feds and they didn’t tell anyone’ sounds like a bad Slashdot title for a security project. Is it sufficient just to always talk about Iran, or is that not subtle enough?”30

  In college Dingledine had dreamed of using technology to create a better world. Now he was suddenly talking about whether or not they should declare war on China and Iran and worrying about being labeled a federal agent? What was going on?

  Berman emailed back, reassuring Dingledine that he and his agency were ready to do anything it took to protect Tor’s independent image. “Roger—we will do any spin you want to do to help preserve the independence of TOR,” he wrote. “We can’t (nor should we) hide it for the reasons you have outlined below, but we also don’t want to shout if from the rafters, either.”

  Berman was an old hand at this. He had spent years funding anticensorship technology at the agency, and he offered a simple solution. He recommended that Dingledine be transparent about Tor’s government funding but also downplay the significance of this relationship and instead focus on the fact that it was all for a good cause: Tor helped guarantee free speech on the Internet. It was sage advice. Saying this would head off any potential criticism, and admitting that Tor got a bit of money from the US government would only serve as proof that Tor had nothing to hide. After all,
what could be nefarious about the government funding freedom of speech on the Internet?

  Others chimed in with advice, as well. One BBG contractor replied to the email thread to tell Dingledine not to worry. No one will care. There will be no backlash. He explained that, in his experience, if people knew about the BBG at all, they considered it totally harmless. “I think most people, especially the smart people who count, understand that government can be good or bad, and government offices, like puppies, should be encouraged when they do the right thing,” he wrote.31

  Despite their reassurances, Dingledine was right to be concerned.

  To be truly effective, Tor couldn’t be perceived as a government system. That meant he needed to put as much distance as possible between Tor and the military intelligence structures that created it. But with funding from the BBG, Dingledine brought Tor right back into the heart of the beast. The BBG might have had a bland name and professed a noble mission to inform the world and spread democracy. In truth, the organization was an outgrowth of the Central Intelligence Agency.

  Covert Operations

  The story of the Broadcasting Board of Governors begins in Eastern Europe in 1948.

  World War II was over, but the United States was already busy gearing up for battle with its main ideological enemy, the Soviet Union. Many generals believed that nuclear war was imminent and that the final confrontation between capitalism and communism was at hand. They drew up elaborate plans for nuclear conquest. America would take out major Soviet cities with nukes and send anticommunist commandos who had been recruited from local populations to take charge and set up provisional governments. The Central Intelligence Agency, along with clandestine military services, trained Eastern Europeans, many of whom had been Nazi collaborators, for the fateful day when they would be parachuted into their homelands to take charge.32

  Though the more hawkish US generals seemed eager for nuclear conflict, many believed that open war with the Soviet Union was too dangerous and cooler heads prevailed. They counseled instead for a more measured approach. George Kennan—the architect of the post–World War II policy of “containment”—pushed for expanding the role of covert programs to fight the Soviet Union. The plan was to use sabotage, assassinations, propaganda, and covert financing of political parties and movements to halt the spread of communism in postwar Europe, and then to use these same covert tools to defeat the Soviet Union itself. Kennan believed that closed authoritarian societies were inherently unstable in comparison with open democratic ones like the United States. To him, traditional war with the Soviet Union was not necessary. Given enough external pressure, he believed, the country would eventually collapse from the weight of its own “internal contradictions.”33

  In 1948, George Kennan helped craft National Security Council Directive 10/2, which officially authorized the CIA—with consultation and oversight from the State Department—to engage in “covert operations” against the communist influence, including everything from economic warfare to sabotage, subversion, and support for armed guerrillas. The directive gave the CIA carte blanche to do whatever was required to fight communism wherever it reared its head.34 Naturally, propaganda emerged as a key part of the agency’s covert operations arsenal. The CIA established and funded radio stations, newspapers, magazines, historical societies, émigré research institutes, and cultural programs all over Europe.35 “These were very broad programs designed to influence world public opinion at virtually every level, from illiterate peasants in the fields to the most sophisticated scholars in prestigious universities,” wrote historian Christopher Simpson in Blowback, a book about the CIA’s use of Nazis and collaborators after World War II. “They drew on a wide range of resources: labor unions, advertising agencies, college professors, journalists, and student leaders.”36

  In Munich, the CIA set up Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberation From Bolshevism (later renamed Radio Liberty), which beamed propaganda in several languages via powerful antennas in Spain into the Soviet Union and Soviet satellite states of Eastern Europe. These stations had a combined annual CIA budget of $35 million—an enormous sum in the 1950s—but the agency’s involvement was hidden by running everything through private front groups.37 They broadcast a range of materials, from straight news and cultural programming to purposeful disinformation and smears aimed at spreading panic and delegitimizing the Soviet government. In some cases, the stations, especially those targeting Ukraine, Germany, and the Baltic States, were staffed by known Nazi collaborators and broadcast anti-Semitic propaganda.38 Although slanted and politicized, these stations provided the only source of unsanctioned outside information to the people of the Soviet bloc. They became highly effective at communicating American ideals and influencing cultural and intellectual trends.

  These projects were not restricted to Europe. As America’s fight against communism shifted and spread around the world, new destabilization and propaganda initiatives were added. The People’s Republic of China was targeted in 1951, when the agency launched Radio Free Asia, which broadcast into mainland China from an office in San Francisco via a radio transmitter in Manila.39 In the 1960s, the CIA launched projects targeting leftist movements in Central and South America. Broadcasts targeting Vietnam and North Korea came online as well.40

  In the words of the CIA, these stations were leading a fight for the “minds and loyalties” of people living in communist countries. The agency later boasted that these early “psychological warfare” radio projects were “one of the longest running and successful covert action campaigns ever mounted by the United States.”41 It was all part of a larger push that Princeton professor Stephen Kotkin refers to as a proactive sphere of cultural and economic influence. “It was a strategy, and that is how the Cold War was won.”42

  This anticommunist global radio network was exposed in a spectacular 1967 CBS program hosted by Mike Wallace, “In the Pay of the CIA.”43 Subsequent congressional investigations brought the agency’s role under further scrutiny, but exposure did not stop the projects; it simply led to a management shakeup: Congress agreed to take over funding of this propaganda project and to run it out in the open.

  Over the next several decades, these radio stations were shuffled, reorganized, and steadily expanded. By the early 2000s, they had grown into the Broadcasting Board of Governors, a federal agency apparatus that functioned like a holding company for rehabilitated CIA propaganda properties. Today it is a big operation that broadcasts in sixty-one languages and blankets the globe: Cuba, China, Iraq, Lebanon, Libya, Morocco, Sudan, Iran, Afghanistan, Russia, Ukraine, Serbia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, North Korea, Laos, and Vietnam.44

  The bulk of the BBG is no longer funded from the CIA’s black budget, but the agency’s original Cold War goal and purpose—subversion and psychological operations directed against countries deemed hostile to US interests—remain the same.45 The only thing that did change about the BBG is that today more and more of its broadcasts are taking place online.

  The agency’s relationship with the Tor Project started with China.

  Internet Freedom

  The CIA had been targeting the People’s Republic of China with covert broadcasting since at least 1951, when the agency launched Radio Free Asia. Over the decades, the agency shut down and relaunched Radio Free Asia under different guises and, ultimately, handed it off to the Broadcasting Board of Governors.46

  When the commercial Internet began to penetrate China in the early 2000s, BBG and Radio Free Asia channeled their efforts into web-based programming. But this expansion didn’t go very smoothly. For years, China had been jamming Voice of America and Radio Free Asia programs by playing loud noises or looping Chinese opera music over the same frequencies with a more powerful radio signal, which bumped American broadcasts off the air.47 When these broadcasts switched to the Internet, Chinese censors hit back, blocking access to BBG websites as well as sporadically cutting access to private Internet services like Google.48 There was nothing surprising a
bout this. Chinese officials saw the Internet as just another communication medium being used by America to undermine their government. Jamming this kind of activity was standard practice in China long before the Internet arrived.49

  Expected or not, the US government did not let the matter drop. Attempts by China to control its own domestic Internet space and block access to material and information were seen as belligerent acts—something like a modern trade embargo that limited US businesses’ and government agencies’ ability to operate freely. Under President George W. Bush, American foreign policy planners formulated policies that would become known over the next decade as “Internet Freedom.”50 While couched in lofty language about fighting censorship, promoting democracy, and safeguarding “freedom of expression,” these policies were rooted in big power politics: the fight to open markets to American companies and expand America’s dominance in the age of the Internet.51 Internet Freedom was enthusiastically backed by American businesses, especially budding Internet giants like Yahoo!, Amazon, eBay, Google, and later Facebook and Twitter. They saw foreign control of the Internet, first in China but also in Iran and later Vietnam, Russia, and Myanmar, as an illegitimate check on their ability to expand into new global markets, and ultimately as a threat to their businesses.