Privacy tools can sometimes create strange bedfellows.

That's what has happened with an anonymizer system that was originally developed and funded by the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory to help government employees shield their identity online. It is now being co-funded and promoted by the civil liberties group Electronic Frontier Foundation.

The system, called Tor, allows users to surf the internet, chat and send instant messages anonymously. It works by transferring traffic three times through random servers, or nodes, on its way from sender to recipient to make it difficult for anyone to trace the data back to its source.

Tor has been completely rebuilt since the Navy initially designed it in the late '90s. The EFF has thrown its support behind the project, and its creators are now hopeful they will be able to add servers and attract new users, thus bolstering the system's privacy and security benefits.

"There's an assumption that people working on government things and people working on EFF things can't possibly be working on the same things," said Roger Dingledine, one of Tor's developers. "But they both want the same sort of security."

Besides, Dingledine said, the Navy is happy to have the outside world using its designs because "it demonstrates that the Navy writes stuff that is useful."

The Naval Research Lab began developing the system in 1996 but handed the code over to Roger Dingledine and Nick Mathewson, two Boston-based programmers, in 2002. The system was designed as part of a program called onion routing, in which data is passed randomly through a distributed network of servers three times, with layers of security protecting the data, like an onion.

Dingledine and Mathewson rewrote the code to make it easier to use and developed a client program so that users could send data from their desktops.

"It's been really obscure until now and hard to use," said Chris Palmer, EFF's technology manager. "(Before) it was just a research prototype for geeks. But now the onion routing idea is finally ready for prime time."

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