I've read about it here: http://fowlchicago.wordpress.com/2013/04/25/tor-project-2012-financial-report-60-of-our-funding-comes-from-the-u-s-government/ What do you think?
Nothing happens amongst us humans without some amount of faith. You can dump a pile of negativity on the state of our country, but at some point you've got to trust someone, for at least 60 to 100 years and enjoy the sunshine.
There's some serious tinfoil hat stuff going on in that blog link there. And this is coming from someone who still keeps one foot firmly in the camp of 9/11 being at least in part an inside job and running a diversified gentleman farm so that when the electric grid fails my family wont starve for the first six months.
Let us all stay ever vigilant, but remember the good things the Internet, representative democracy and modern infrastructure have granted us (for one, the ability to complain openly about the Gov't without being executed, most of the time ;p ).
But yes, this is a fairly widely known fact. I expect that most heavy users probably know this, but it still surprises a lot of people (can't count the number of times I've heard people say "TOR? Oh, the government will shut that down if it ever gets popular."