Tor Welcomes New Executive Director To The Project

Posted by: Benjamin Vitáris

December 18, 2015

On December 11, the Tor Project officially announced the new executive director, Shari Steele, to the community in the form of a blog post. Shari Steele has been the Legal Director, then, later on, the Executive Director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). The EFF is an international non-profit digital rights group based in the USA that helps to protect personal freedoms (mostly from governments) and new technologies from legal problems and threats.

The Project is pretty happy since their search for the job post has finally ended, but more importantly, they state that Steele has been always a ”good friend” for them and they have known each other for a long time. They made this statement about their relations:

”We’ve known Shari for a long time. She led EFF’s choice to fund Tor back in 2004-2005. She is also the one who helped create EFF’s technology department, which has brought us HTTPS Everywhere and their various guides and tool assessments,” said arma, a Tor developer who made the blog post.

The Tor Project states that their technical side is ”world-class”, however, they believe in that with Shari Steele in charge, the organizational side of the group will become excellent too. They hope that Steele’s work with EFF’s funding model will be of great help to Tor since they are constantly trying to diversify the funding sources for the project. Arma’s official statement goes by:

”She shares our core values, she brings leadership in managing and coordinating people, she has huge experience in growing a key non-profit in our space, and her work pioneering EFF’s community-based funding model will be especially valuable as we continue our campaign to diversify our funding sources.”

”Tor is part of a larger family of civil liberties organizations, and this move makes it clear that Tor is a main figure in that family. Nick and I will focus short-term on shepherding a smooth transition out of our “interim” roles, and after that we are excited to get back to our old roles actually doing technical work. I’ll let Shari pick up the conversation from here, in her upcoming blog post.”

”Please everybody join me in welcoming Shari!”

Updated: 2015-12-18