The Tor Project sprung out of a research project at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory, and to this day a large part of its funding comes from U.S. government s

The Tor Project sprung out of a research project at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory, and to this day a large part of its funding comes from U.S. government sources. This is entirely fine as far as I can tell - the U.S. interest can be explained as two-fold: First, it could be a genuine wish to fund projects with potential to support freedom of expression in parts of the world they think need it (Secretary of State Clinton has expressed this as a policy at least once). Second, and I think this is the more important reason, is that the various intelligence arms in the U.S. need Tor for themselves, in order to provide anonymous means of communications for secret agents and other foreign operatives who work in hostile environments. The important thing to realise is that low-latency mixnets absolutely depend on being widely used by many kinds of users for many purposes, so that each user can hide in the crowd. Therefore Tor absolutely needs to be publicly available - if American spies were its only users, they would stick out like sore thumbs and the entire thing would be hilariously pointless. Tor is of course open source and can be inspected for backdoors and such, and its design continues to be subject to scrutiny and research. If there is a danger involved, it is an attack where the U.S. government controls sufficiently many Tor nodes in order to be able to do traffic analysis efficiently. So far I don't know of any signs of this, and I question if they would want to sabotage a project that has such a useful potential for themselves.