Roger Dingledine

Tor Project

Tor was developed by Dingledine—with Nick Mathewson and Paul Syverson—under a contract from the United States Naval Research Laboratory. As of 2006, the software they developed was being distributed using proceeds from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, by the The Tor Project. As described at the end of 2015,

The Tor Project develops and maintains... The Tor Browser system, also known as The Onion Router… a free, open source and sophisticated privacy tool that provides anonymity for web surfing and communication

as well as developing and maintaining other software tools and applications. As of December 2016, Dingledine continues in a leadership rôle with the Tor project, as a Project Leader, Director, Research Director, having added Shari Steele as its new Executive Director, formerly of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, in December 2015.

Awards and honours

Dingledine was named as one of the 2006 thirty-five Innovators Under 35 by MIT Technology Review, for its work on internet anonymization technologies through the Tor Project. The Review described the importance of the work in this way:

A dissident in China uses Web-based e-mail to contact a journalist in Canada. An intelligence agency wants to surveil a foreign website. Like every operation on the Internet, these activities leave tracks. Online anonymity measures provide a way around this problem; one of the most advanced is Tor, or the Onion Router. / Computer scientist Roger Dingledine developed Tor…

Media attention

Dingledine has drawn attention after the leak of NSA documents by Edward Snowden, and public disclosure of the rules guiding the operation of XKeyscore, the NSA's collection system, given XKeyscore's targeting of Tor Project onion servers, including the one Dingledine runs at MIT, which serves a directory authority for the system, as well as being the base of operation of the MixMinion mail service, and host to various gaming and other websites (from which the NSA might be collecting IP addresses).