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52 | HOW AMERICA LOST ITS SECRETS of the twenty-first century, the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency developed it to allow American intelligence operatives to cloak their movements on the Internet. They could anonymously manipulate websites oper- ated by Islamic radicals, for example, and create their own Trojan horse sites to lure would-be terrorists and spies. As it turned out, that use of Tor software had a conceptual flaw. If U.S. intelligence services used it, the targets could figure out that anyone visiting a site without an IP address was using Tor software to hide it. If Tor was exclusively used by U.S. intelligence services, the targets could further deduce that all the anonymous visitors were avatars for American intelligence. It would be analogous to undercover police using pink-colored cars that civilians did not use. To remedy this flaw, the U.S. government made Tor software open source in 2008 and freely available to everyone in the world. It even provided funding for its promulgation, with the State Department, the National Science Foundation, and the Broadcasting Board of Governors financing Tor’s core developer. The public rationale for ) this generosity was that Tor could serve as a tool for, as the State ® Department called it, “democracy advocates in authoritarian states.” While Tor software remained a useful tool in covert operations by the CIA, the DIA, and the FBI, it was anathema to the NSA because it made it more difficult for it to track potential targets. As Tor software became widely used by adversaries (as well as common criminals), the NSA sought to find vulnerabilities in it. “It should hardly be surprising that our intelligence agencies seek ways to counteract targets that use Tor software to hide their communica- tions,” explained an NSA spokesperson. The NSA’s adversaries also took an interest in identifying Tor users because they might include political dissidents and potential spies. Tor software also took on a cultlike importance to hacktivists con- cerned with the U.S. government’s tracking their activities. Catherine A. Fitzpatrick provides an illuminating insight into the mind-set of these hacktivists in her 2014 book, Privacy for Me and Not for Thee. She describes them as largely “radical anarchists” who believe “the state is all-powerful, that law-enforcement is so strong that it will prevail anyway, and that they are a persecuted minority.” As a refuge | | Epst_9780451494566_2p_all_r1.z.indd 52 ® 9/29/16 5:51 Pa | | HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_019540