A core team of Tor Project employees mingled with Berlin cypherpunk underground at a secret location on New Year’s Eve 2015. There was one person missing: Shari Steele, their new executive director who was publicly introduced few days earlier with much fanfare at the hacker’s oldest gathering: The annual Chaos Communications Congress in Hamburg.
Steele says that’s the way she work and will continue to work like that for Tor. Her former colleagues also confirmed that she loves to work behind the scenes and is quite effective in doing so.
Steele was the executive director of Electronic Frontier Foundation for 15 years before coming Tor and it was her decision as the head of EFF in 2004 to take Tor under the company’s wing. That is the reason Tor exists in its current shape today. However, she does not take any credit for that and it earned her the loyalty of Tor employees and devotees.
The Tor online anonymity network is a software suite designed for online anonymity and censorship circumvention. It was earlier called The Onion Router as it users maintains online anonymity by disguising their online traffic under the layers of relays just like an onion.
Even though Tor gets around 2 million users daily, it has faced trouble while gaining traction with people associating its online anonymity features with criminal activity and child abuse.
For example, Cryptowall, a website which accesses and encrypts files on a victim’s computer and only releases them after a payment of ransom, is the first to use Tor to host such sites where the criminals demand payment. James Comey, the FBI director who has campaigned to make automatic encryption illegal for a long time says that those sites give cyber criminals an extra layer of online anonymity making them even more difficult to track.
Tor has continuously struggled with to disassociate itself from the outrageous users of online anonymity. It makes the case for journalists, law enforcement, whistleblowers, etc. It even started as a US Naval Research Laboratory project in 2002.
According to Steele, Tor staffs are generally “freedom fighters” as they desperately care about the technology and what it means to the world. She also added that they love the product and the organization, even though it has not supported them some times and they have not been able to depend on the organization.
One of the biggest concerns for staff is its funding model. Tor gets money from US government and many are concerned that a single source of money can damage its credibility and make it more vulnerable. Most of the staff feels that it should look for other sources.
Steele also agrees that Tor’s funding model is quite unusual. For a software suite like Tor that promotes itself of government circumvention, but gets funding entirely from US government is not good. Steele mentioned that Tor is open to other funding resources and will look to explore many of them in near future.
Even though Tor is registered as a non-profit organization, it failed to get any significant money from individuals, organizations, corporate donors, etc. Steele is aware of that and briefly spoke about it during Tor’s recent keynote speech to 3,500 people attending the event. She has introduced a funding drive raising $170,000 till now and looking for more to keep up the ongoing work in the organization, which is important for maintaining online anonymity of its user base.
Visit http://internet-anonymity.com/ to read more about online anonymity.
