Paul Syverson

In the mid-1990s Syverson, David Goldschlag and Michael Reed at the Naval Research Laboratory devised onion routing: a message is encrypted in layers, one per relay, and each relay peels off its own layer and sees only the previous and next hop. It built on David Chaum's mix networks, but for interactive, real-time traffic. The first paper appeared in 1996.

The Navy soon ran into the fundamental problem: an anonymity network used only by the intelligence community isn't very anonymous. It needed the public. In 2002 Syverson began working with Roger Dingledine and Nick Mathewson on a second generation, and in 2004 they presented Tor at USENIX Security. That one of the world's most widely used tools against state surveillance was funded by a state is an irony the Tor people are happy to point out themselves.