Tor dropped Vidalia in 2013, replacing it with other tools designed to improve the user experience.Įdman joined the project the same day as Jacob Appelbaum, the hacker and journalist famous for his work with WikiLeaks and Edward Snowden, the former NSA contractor who leaked a trove of documents to the press in 2013, as well as Tor.īy 2012, Edman was working at Mitre Corporation as a senior cybersecurity engineer assigned to the FBI’s Remote Operations Unit, the bureau’s little-known internal team tapped to build or buy custom hacks and malware for spying on potential criminals. According to the Tor Project, however, “Vidalia was the only Tor software to which Edman was able to commit changes.” He wrote and contributed to research papers with the creators of Tor and helped other members in their work building privacy tools. The Baylor University graduate became part of the close-knit pro-privacy community, attending the developer meetings and contributing to Vidalia development.

in computer science that he would obtain in 2011 from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. He was a graduate student then, pursuing a Ph.D. In 2008, Edman joined the Tor Project as a developer to work on Vidalia, a piece of software meant to make Tor easier for normal users by implementing a simple user interface.

“It has come to our attention that Matt Edman, who worked with the Tor Project until 2009, subsequently was employed by a defense contractor working for the FBI to develop anti-Tor malware,” the Tor Project confirmed in a statement after being contacted by the Daily Dot. intelligence agencies in several high-profile cases. It’s been wielded in multiple investigations by federal law-enforcement and U.S. Since then, he’s developed potent malware used by law enforcement to unmask Tor users.

Matt Edman is a cybersecurity expert who worked as a part-time employee at Tor Project, the nonprofit that builds Tor software and maintains the network, almost a decade ago.

Tor broswer december fbi