Patch Race in Tor Between Devs and Spies

Spy vs. Spy takes on new meaning if you're talking about Tor. The popular software used to obfuscate a user's digital shadow has been targeted by state intelligence agencies like NSA and GCHQ and defended by counter-intelligence reports from other agents in those same agencies, alleges a Tor Browser engineer.

"There are plenty of people in both organisations who can anonymously leak data to us to say - maybe you should look here, maybe you should look at this to fix this," [Andrew Lewman] said. "And they have."

Mr Lewman is part of a team of software engineers responsible for the Tor Browser - software designed to prevent it being possible to trace users' internet activity. The programs involved also offer access to otherwise hard-to-reach websites, some of which are used for illegal purposes.