Q623 Dr Huppert: Mr Murdoch has been a bit silent so far. Tor has a slightly different relationship to this. What would be the consequences of this Bill on your operations? Are there specific consequences that you would have directly?

Steven Murdoch: In some sense that is difficult to say, because the Bill does not go into very much detail. The Tor Project or architecture is very different from these other systems. We do not process the communications of the users. People who use the Tor network download the software from us, but their communications go over servers that are operated by volunteers to which we do not have access. Because we have designed the system to have privacy from the start, we would not technically be able to hand over any communications data, regardless of whether we were ordered to do so. Whether we fall under the legislation at all is an open question, and we have not had any guidance as to what they believe. If we did, we would have to substantially change the architecture of Tor, and basically rewrite it from scratch, before we could do anything useful to provide communications data. Long before that happened, our funders would pull out and the users would pull out and the project would effectively cease.