content: The original research into onion-routing was. That work was later turned into a working routing implementation called TOR about 12 years later. Hell, there's even a name-dropping fluff piece on the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) team that laid the ground work for tor on the NRL site. So that much is fact. There's a nice article referenced on the Tor wikipedia page that does a decent rundown of the project's interesting history. Don't really know what to make of all this. Tor is always touted as the ultimate working example of a pseudo-anonymous network. This bit from Michael Reed, one of the original DARPA researchers, on the Tor Talk mailing list is interesting:  The original QUESTION posed that led to the invention of Onion Routing was, “Can we build a system that allows for bi-directional communications over the Internet where the source and destination cannot be determined by a mid-point?” The PURPOSE was for DoD / Intelligence usage (open source intelligence gathering, covering of forward deployed assets, whatever). Not helping dissidents in repressive countries. Not assisting criminals in covering their electronic tracks. Not helping bit-torrent users avoid MPAA/RIAA prosecution. Not giving a 10 year old a way to bypass an anti-porn filter. Of course, we knew those would be other unavoidable uses for the technology, but that was immaterial to the problem at hand we were trying to solve (and if those uses were going to give us more cover traffic to better hide what we wanted to use the network for, all the better…I once told a flag officer that much to his chagrin).