As a result of the obvious tension, there have been sustained internal and external conversations about how to achieve financial independence from the American government, according to conversations with Tor employees and a review of the organization’s annual developer meetings. In certain key contexts, intelligence agencies and law enforcement see Tor developers as adversaries - and the feeling is largely mutual, especially as the encryption debate may rise yet again on Capitol Hill. On a stage in Hamburg in 2014, Tor developers said they would rather be murdered than add compromises or backdoors at the behest of a government. The organization has always been vocally anti-surveillance and pro-privacy, positions that increasingly took it into direct conflict with BBG as the full extent of American internet surveillance has come into clearer view and drawn more debate. Since then, it has only continued to grow: The network’s total bandwidth has more than doubled in the last two years. Tor has quietly played a role in several crucial historical moments during the new century - WikiLeaks was founded with documents intercepted over Tor, Edward Snowden used Tor to leak classified NSA documents to the press, global journalists increasingly rely on Tor to communicate with sources - and the technology aids dissidents and activists around the world.

Navy beginning in the 1990s and has since, as an independent nonprofit, received more than 90 percent of its funding from American government sources including organizations under the BBG. If that comes to pass, both Trump and Bannon could end up with their fingerprints on whatever the future of internet freedom may be. Many expect Trump’s chief strategist and senior counselor Steve Bannon - the media executive behind the meteoric rise of right-wing - to take close personal interest in the BBG’s new era. The bipartisan board previously in charge will be disbanded and replaced by a CEO, who will be appointed directly by Trump. Under the new defense bill, the Broadcasting Board of Governors will no longer be an independent agency. However, growing domestic worries over surveillance have seen growing numbers of Americans adopt the tools funded by their government. The initial big idea behind the funding - which had bipartisan support - was to open up countries where censorship in a problem, such as China. In addition to its massive news operation, BBG is among the most important entities funding technology that allows users free and unfettered access to the internet. It continues to be a major source of information in suppressive countries around the world. The agency’s history and the organizations it supervises - Voice of America, Radio Free Asia, Middle East Broadcast Networks and so on - extend back to World War II. government’s largest public-diplomacy program, reaching an audience of hundreds of millions through television, radio and websites meant to inject American-style, pro-democracy news into more closed societies. With an annual budget of more than $700 million, the BBG is the U.S. “I have no idea what the future looks like,” Shari Steele, Tor’s executive director, told CyberScoop. Almost everyone who spoke with CyberScoop chose to do so under condition of anonymity or off the record, a decision made largely because their projects’ livelihoods - as well as their own - depend on what happens between the White House, the State Department and the BBG.

In conversations with current and former employees of entities that make and maintain such products, there is a sense of profound uncertainty and anxiety about what will survive. A host of smaller-profile tools, like privacy-first operating systems, rely even more heavily on federal support and their survival could be threatened. The legislation will give the new president - whose few decipherable comments on cybersecurity include vocal opposition to strong encryption and a push to expand surveillance - more direct power over the federal funding that goes to projects like Tor and Signal, both of which have taken millions from the U.S. The president-elect will gain nearly direct control over the Broadcasting Board of Governors - as well as the agencies it oversees and the millions of dollars in annual internet-freedom funding - thanks to a provision etched deep in the 2017 National Defense Authorization Act cleared by Congress in early December. Faced with possible existential threats to projects like the Tor anonymity network and encrypted messaging platform Signal, the people who develop these tools are searching for new ways to survive in the age of Donald Trump. After a season of stunning electoral upsets, the future of internet freedom technology is now deeply uncertain.

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