Michael G. Reed
One of the three researchers at the US Navy's lab who invented onion routing.
Michael Reed was at the US Naval Research Laboratory when, in 1995–1996, he developed onion routing with Paul Syverson and David Goldschlag. The idea: encrypt a message in layers, one per relay, so each node knows only where a packet came from and where it goes next – never both ends. The papers Hiding Routing Information (1996) and Anonymous Connections and Onion Routing (1998) laid the groundwork.
The goal was to protect US government traffic on a public network, and that required an awkward realisation: if only spies use the network, using it gives them away. Anonymity needs a crowd to hide in, which is why the technology was released to everyone. Its successor, Tor, was built from 2002 by Roger Dingledine and Nick Mathewson.