I find it very interesting that the Navy and DARPA (and even the State Department) fund the Tor project. If you don't already know, Tor is an anonymity mode of browsing the web. Traffic isn't pin-pointed to a specific location and is encrypted heavily through each node it passes, however any content can be seen at the exit. Just not who it is coming from (or where). Very interesting indeed that these organizations have given us the tools to evade the programs they created to spy on us.
I'll be damned. wiki link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tor_(anonymity_network)#History That's very interesting, I haven't played with Tor in a long time but I never got the impression it even needed a lot of funding. I just kind of thought it was more of a grassroots open source project.Originally sponsored by the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory[8] (which had been instrumental in the early development of onion routing under the aegis of DARPA), Tor was financially supported by the Electronic Frontier Foundation from 2004 to 2005.[10] Tor software is now developed by the Tor Project, which has been a 501(c)(3) research-education nonprofit organization [11] based in the United States of America [1] since December 2006. It has a diverse base of financial support;[10] the U.S. State Department, the Broadcasting Board of Governors, and the National Science Foundation are major
contributors.[12] As of 2012, 80% of the Tor Project's $2M annual budget comes from the United States government, with the Swedish government and other organizations providing the rest,[13] including NGOs and thousands of individual sponsors.[14]
The Tor guys are pretty open about how they got their funding and their relationships with government. I'd say most the time they give talks it comes up at least tangentially. Both of the developers have faced harassment by government officials and support for their work. The U.S. government is a big operation with many competing interest.