How We Work
The Tor Project is driven by ideas. We believe in the right to privacy for every person on the planet. Our community—paid and volunteer—brainstorms projects that embody those ideas, like decentralized hidden messaging systems or ingenious new ways to get uncensored Internet access to people in China.
On our public wikis, we make lists of what we need to build these projects—and then we approach potential sponsors with these lists. If we’re lucky, a sponsor will pay to do the project. If not, we may make it for free.
This is true whether the potential sponsor is a government agency or anyone else.
Because of this system, some projects, like hidden services, need more funding, and we are seeking individual contributions to make this technology stronger. One day we hope to build it into many more programs—for instance, phone apps--to make them private and secure by default.
Our diverse, international community includes thousands of men and women inspired by the ideals we share. They work to support Tor and create important tools based on Tor, like Tails and Orbot (there are at least a dozen of these). Our group includes visionaries who think and talk publicly about the Internet and the future of privacy; among them: @nickm_tor, @ioerror and @RogerDingledine. @aaronsw was one of us.
We will accept no back doors to our software, ever. You can watch @ioerror talk about this at last year’s 31c3 talk in Hamburg. We believe in and build free, open source software—free as in freedom. Tor’s source code is online for everyone to see.
We are proud of our people, our work, and our ideals. We are a human rights organization. We are inventors. Our community is a workshop for the future of privacy tools; maybe even for the future of privacy.
The Tor community is open to newcomers; we hope you will join us.
Everything's good at
Everything's good at Tor--but it's clear that not everybody outside of Tor knows about our system for deciding what to work on-- so I thought I'd clarify it.
Hi is there an _official_
Hi
is there an _official_ way to bootstrp tor-client with help of another active tor-client? and so use not preloaded but current list of entry/directory servers?
Kate, many thanks for your
Kate, many thanks for your great statement!
But one question: Why this statement right now? Are there any new threats to the Tor Project?