# Tor **Tor** — originally "The Onion Router" — is an anonymity network that routes traffic through a volunteer-operated relay chain, encrypting it in layers so that no single relay knows both the origin and the destination. Onion routing was developed at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory in the 1990s; a public alpha was released in 2002 and the independent nonprofit Tor Project was founded in 2006. Much of its funding has continued to come from U.S. government sources, principally for internet-freedom programming. Tor supports two distinct uses: anonymous browsing of the ordinary web, and **hidden services**, which conceal the location of the server rather than the client. The second is what made darknet markets possible, including **Silk Road**. The persistent policy tension — the same tool protects dissidents, journalists, and criminal marketplaces, and cannot be engineered to serve only the first two — is the clearest live instance of the encryption debate tracked under [[Encryption]] and [[Surveillance State]]. See also [[Dark Web]]. > [!note] Stub > Spine stub. Expand: the relay and directory architecture, known deanonymization attacks and the Carnegie Mellon subpoena affair, the funding controversy, and Tor's role in censorship circumvention.