The Pentagon is trying to make the Internet more anonymous

If you want to use the Internet and you don’t want the National Security Agency to see what you’re doing, you basically only need one tool: Tor, a network that anonymizes web traffic by bouncing it between servers.

The NSA has been working on ways to get around "the Tor problem" for years without much success. "It should hardly be surprising that our intelligence agencies seek ways to counteract targets’ use of technologies to hide their communications," the agency told BusinessWeek back in January. The NSA says Tor is now used by "terrorists, cybercriminals, [and] human traffickers," so you’d think the Pentagon might consider that investment a mistake. Not so.

The military has been working on a new generation of even bigger and better anonymity tools to supplement and replace Tor. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency or DARPA, the Pentagon’s high-tech research lab, started working on anonymity roughly four years ago through the Safer Warfighter Communications program, a collection of tools designed to thwart blacklisting, redirection, and content filtering.