Al Smith: Sustainable Funding for Internet Freedom Tools | Intelligence at the Frontier 2026

Hi everyone. My name's Al. I'm the director of fundraising of the Tor Project and wow, just serendipitous that we had DARPA and uh US funding research talk right before the Tor Project comes on stage when I'm going to talk about how fragile that is when policies change and intentions of the government change and committed contracted funding is taken away from a bunch of different projects and how that impacts real people, right? Um but first I want to share with you a story from a Tor user because this really underlines why this matters. Let's see if I'm doing this in the right direction.

Where am I pointing?

[clears throat]

Which direction should I put Okay, great. Um This is a from a Tor user who opted in to have the story shared. Uh we asked for Tor users to give their input. We don't track any of our users. We don't use, you know, invasive data collection to learn about how our how our products work.

We talk to users directly. So this is a user-submitted story from last year. They said, "There's censorship in many areas of Turkey. The legal right is being violated and every site that supports an opposing view is being censored quickly. The news is already being taken over.

YouTube, Wikipedia, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter have been censored many times. TV channels and radio stations are only reporting news that the government deems appropriate. Our right to access the truth is being taken away from us. The existence of Tor Browser is comforting in these difficult days." So this is an example of somebody who's using Tor to access information that has been censored by their government.

These sites have been turned off. The ISPs have been directed by governments to turn off those sites, and this user is using Tor Browser to get around that block. That's how that technology works. So, how does Tor do this as a small nonprofit that is working against global adversaries that have billions and billions of dollars to spend on censorship technology? We're also not a for-profit company, and we're not the government.

We do this through community. Um a community of applications, a community of thousands of relay operators, a community of hundreds of different volunteers, and the technical design of Tor is inherently distributed. It has to be built of a community. The relays that make up the Tor network are a distributed network of thousands of volunteers who are all over the world, who are not controlled by us as an entity, who are running this because they believe in the human rights of privacy and human rights to freely access the internet. [clears throat] You also have hundreds of volunteer developers who are contributing to our code.

We have researchers and students who are looking at questions of anonymity and privacy and censorship circumvention, and looking at Tor and submitting security and privacy uh peer research improvements that we can implement in our tools. We also have volunteer translators who are translating Tor Browser into more than 50 50 languages, and we have a core contributor group that is tasked with community governance. So, making sure that the community is healthy, voting on different policies, and ensuring that this ecosystem around Tor uh is functioning. So, that's an effective way to build a censorship is to anti-censorship tool. It's really effective.

It's so effective that Tor has become the target of governments that want to censor information. Can you skip two slides, please? Thank you. So, we have to build tools that prevent those governments from blocking Tor. Those tools are designed to disguise Tor traffic.

So, that governments can't say, "Ooh, I see that's Tor. I'm going to block it. You can't access the free internet." So, we have designed tools called pluggable transports that essentially disguise internet traffic as something else. For example, pluggable transports can disguise traffic as WebRTC calls.

So, it looks like someone's making a video call. They're actually connecting to Tor. Where that is brilliant, in my opinion, is that there's uh high collateral damage. If the censor decides they want to block those WebRTC calls, they block all WebRTC calls. If they're trying to target Tor traffic that's disguised in this way, they're blocking all the video calls on the network.

It's really hard for a censor to say, "We want to target Tor traffic enough that we are going to block all video calls in the country or all video calls through this ISP." So, that high collateral damage is also part of why these pluggable transports are effective. So, how do we tap into this community element of Tor? All of these thousands of contributors who believe in the mission of human rights, who believe in the mission of the right to access information, and add that to the concept of pluggable transports. This is Snowflake.

Snowflake is a pluggable transport that you, anybody here, whoever has their laptop out, you can install

[laughter]

you can install a plugin to your Chrome browser or your Firefox browser and become an ephemeral proxy. That means for people who are living in places where Tor is blocked, like Iran, China, Russia, you can be a little entryway into the Tor network for them. And it'll be on while your laptop is on. It'll go off when you shut off your laptop. And that's why it's a camera roll, and it's a pool of thousands and thousands of different proxies that are hard to detect because they're going on and off all day.

They're changing all day. They're all across the world distributed. And you click to the next slide, please. This is what it looks like. I was putting these slides together today.

I had my snowflake on. And I I see that little number one. And in the 20 minutes that I was putting together my slides, I helped one person jump over censorship. So, that's I love looking at my numbers. Uh So, it's really easy.

The barrier to entry is really low. A lot of the other parts of contributing to Tor can feel really impossibly technical. Like spinning up a relay, what does that even mean? You know, how do I set up a server? I don't know how to do that.

I can definitely do this, though. And lots of people are motivated to do this because it's easy and because they believe in freedom of expression. They believe in the free access to information is a human right. When we deployed Snowflake in the real world, we saw a bump in Russia. We thought, "Oh, wow, it's working in Russia."

Russia has implemented some really strict censorship in the last 4 to 5 years, and we saw that Snowflake was effective there. We're excited. This thing that we're bringing from research to practice is effective. And then, 2020 happened, which is when the Mahsa Amini protests, women life freedom protests happened in Iran. And the Iranian government was turning off social media.

They said, "No Facebook, no Instagram, no Twitter. You can't get on Google. You can't use Telegram." And Iranians were using Snowflake to get over that censorship. They were able to use Snowflake to get their message out of a country that was trying very hard to stop them from spreading the word, from sharing what was happening, from publishing photos.

Next slide. And because Snowflake is so easy to adopt, the barrier to entry is so low, people are picking this up both on social media and in real life as a suggestion, as a way to participate in helping folks uh get around censorship. And this is a sign in Germany from a protest in support of the Iranian protesters that said, "To help, use Snowflake at torproject.org. Install the extension and you can help people get around censorship.

So, it's a big community effort. During this time, our volunteer proxy went from 20,000 proxies to 130,000 proxies. So, there's a real like desire to help. And there's there's a lot of people who think, "I can't do that in terms of running a relay, but I can definitely do an extension that I install on my browser and I'm motivated to do that cuz this story matters to me. And it matters to me that we have free speech in the world.

Uh and what I can offer is a little bit of my bandwidth." Okay, next slide, please. Thanks. So, I want to go back to another user story. This is Nadia, another pseudonym opt-in consented to to have this public publicly shared.

She says, "I'm using Tor for accessing the internet freely. I need it because my country in my country the internet is censored. Tor is free and multi-platform. And then she goes on to say, "VPN services are not working properly in my country or they're not free. And I don't have any payment methods that they accept."

So, this is an example of someone who is needs Tor to get around censorship, but two, they need another kind of tool to be able to really access the internet freely. They don't have a payment method that the other internet freedom freedom tools accept. So, this is an example of someone who really needs at least two things to go on the internet freely. Probably multiple things, private messaging, the ability to privately archive the things that they've found on Tor browser and see if we save out in our computer, so it's not discovered. Uh the ability to publish on social media without it being tied to their identity either, you know, in the background by the government or publicly.

So, there's a whole ecosystem of things you really need to have in order to access internet freedom. We can't just have private browsing and then message someone the link on iMessage. That's not that's not internet freedom. You get that you get easily discovered. So, you need an ecosystem.

And the great news, next slide, is that right now 45 million people are being supported by an ecosystem of internet freedom tools that are 150. These tools exist. They're tested. They're they're battle-tested, truly. Uh and they're built by a community of people who who believe in the human right to free access to information.

The bad news is, next slide, policy change. On that, last year, uh a bipartisan, decades-long funding agreement that was really reliable, went away. Rug pull. All of these projects had grants that were rescinded in the middle of the contract. 45 million people were put at risk because the government policy changed and they said, "No more money.

We're ending your contracts. This is done." And that it highlights the problem of centralized funding, right? If you have one funder, if you rely on one funder, this can happen at any time. The winds can change.

Whether it's government, whether it's EC, whether it's your patron, you know, all of these things, they can change. And if you have one of them and it goes away, that can be a disaster. So, it's highlighting that even though all of these tools have decentralized infrastructure like Tor, volunteer relay operators. They're designed to be free, open source, private, distributed. The funding mechanism was not distributed.

It was centralized. And that's that can be bad. And that is bad. It's bad right now. And that's where Funding the Commons comes in.

They have been really helpful for us in the last 5 years in reimagining what it is to fund a public good like Tor. Tor's been around for 20 years. We've been grappling with what is it to become a public good that was founded with government money. Government research money. Then funded with government human rights money.

And now, what are we? Where do we get our funding? How can we reduce reliance on government funds? And Funding the Commons has helped us explore that idea. And when we came to them and said, "This funding crisis is happening to our community.

These tools that support 45 million people to get on the free internet have lost their funds, are going to shutter, have had to lay off people." Funding the Commons came back to us and said, "This is This is the moment that we need to try some of these experimental or uh piloted ideas that we've done in the Ethereum community and see if they resonate in the internet freedom community. There's a lot of overlap and values in privacy and the idea of decentralization. And we think that that's possible that we can run some kind of crowdfunding campaign for the internet freedom community that can take advantage of these ideas that can be more community oriented and less centralized. So, with FTC, we're going to be running a fundraiser campaign in May 2026, not to benefit Tor, but to use our platform to benefit the internet freedom ecosystem.

Because even though this happened to all of us, Tor was able to survive relatively unscathed, but the ecosystem of tools that exist around us and that our users also use have been really impacted and we need to support them so that these 45 million people don't lose access to the internet. So, we're going to be running this campaign. It's going to be a little bit different in that one, we're going to have a banner on Tor browser. We're going to be inviting people to come learn about the story. Why Why is this happening?

What is happening to these tools in the ecosystem? And how you can help. Uh that gets exposed to 2.2-ish million people a day. And then we're going to be using quadratic funding, which some of you in this room might know what that means and some of you might not.

And basically, we're trying to make funding more equitable and taking away the power of one really rich donor who comes in and influences the whole campaign and distributing that governance power of funding into the community. So, that a person with $1 can also make a vote that distributes matched funds in more equitable way. And then two, whenever you involve voting and money and you correlate these two things, there's issues of coercion and fraud and problems about privacy. So, we're really using a piloted technology called minimal anti-collusion infrastructure that the Ethereum Foundation develops and that Gitcoin has piloted in a couple of rounds. And using this in the campaign uh so that those are private and everything is cryptographically uh proven.

So, it's really exciting. I think that this is a right the right moment to bring these ideas into the internet freedom ecosystem instead of the internet freedom ecosystem going over there. Uh it's really important that you support these tools. Honestly, they're operating on a shoestring budget and doing amazing amazing work for millions and millions of people. And I'm looking forward to seeing the results and sharing them.

Shout out to FTC, whoever's here. Thank you for working with us on this. Um and shout out to the tools in the room who have been affected by this funding cut. We've got open archive right here. Who helps human rights defenders safely and privately archive information and it's had to scale back some of their work because of these funding cuts.

Yeah, I look forward to sharing more and I hope you come check out Tor Browser on in May 2026. And if you have any ideas you want to talk about this please come talk. Let's let's brainstorm. Um This is a new new area for us. So I'd love your ideas and thanks for having me.

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