At a secret location on New Year’s Eve 2015, a core team of Tor Project employees mingled with the Berlin cypherpunk underground. One person was missing: their new executive director, Shari Steele, who had been introduced publicly a few days earlier to much fanfare at the world’s oldest gathering of hackers: the annual Chaos Communications Congress in Hamburg.

Steele says it’s accurate to describe her as avoiding the spotlight. “That is the way I work, and how I will continue to work at Tor,” Steele told the Guardian. Former co-workers confirmed: she likes to work behind the scenes, and is extremely effective doing so.

Steele comes to Tor after 15 years as executive director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), an organization she joined as a staff lawyer in 1992 shortly after it was founded. A trained lawyer, Steele advised, among other bodies, the US sentencing commission on suitable terms for computer security offences and the National Research Council on encryption policy.

Perhaps most significantly, it was her decision, as head of the EFF in 2004, to take Tor under the foundation’s wing that is the reason Tor exists in its current shape today, according to Roger Dingledine, who helped found the Tor Project in 2006. Steele won’t take the credit for that decision, but it earned her the loyalty of Tor staff and devotees.

The Tor Project itself is the US non-profit responsible for the development of the Tor network, a suite of software for online anonymity and censorship circumvention. Tor was originally called The Onion Router because the software keeps its users anonymous by disguising their internet traffic under layers of relays – like the layers of an onion.

The people working on Tor are not doing it for the Dark Web – that's not what it’s about Shari Steele

“The basic idea is you have your software, it pulls down a list of the 8,000 relays,” or network nodes, computers running Tor’s relay software, “and it builds a path through three of them so that no single relay can learn where you’re coming from and where you’re going,” explains Dingledine.

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For many developers, there is an ideological and moral incentive to contribute to the project. “One of the reasons I feel that my work on Tor bridge relays is so important is because I get to help people all over the world, in various situations, circumvent internet censorship and be able to freely access information and communicate their ideas,” said core developer Isis Lovecruft. “Without being able to do so, all progression of science and human understanding could grind to a halt.”

Although it claims more than 2 million users per day, Tor has had trouble gaining traction with people who have come to associate its anonymity features with criminal activity and child abuse.

In remarks to the House judiciary committee in October, for example, the FBI director, James Comey, who has campaigned to make automatic encryption illegal, referenced CryptoWall, which accesses and encrypts files on a victim’s computer and will only release them on payment of a ransom. CryptoWall was the first to use Tor to host the sites where the criminals demanded payment. “All this gives cybercriminals an additional layer of anonymity that makes them even more difficult to track,” said Comey.

Earlier in 2015, assistant attorney general of the Justice Department Leslie Caldwell told Washington’s State of the Net conference that as much as 80% of the traffic on Tor involves child abuse material.

Wired immediately said the statistic was wrong; Caldwell was misrepresenting research that had found that 80% of hidden traffic involved child abuse, not 80% of all Tor traffic. Hidden sites account for around 2% of all Tor traffic.

Regardless of the facts, Tor has struggled to disassociate itself from the nefarious users of internet anonymity. Its own site makes the case for journalists, law enforcement, whistleblowers and also the military; Tor started as a project of the US Naval Research Laboratory in 2002.

“The media has really picked up on this story of Tor and the dark web,” says Steele, adamantly.

“The reality is that the dark web is collateral. The people who are working on Tor are not doing it for the dark web. That’s not what it is; that’s not what it’s about or what people care about.”



Steele describes the people who work on Tor as “freedom fighters”. “The people who are working on the Tor project are doing it because they care desperately about the technology and they care desperately about what the technology means to the world,” said Steele.

“They see themselves as being freedom fighters. And they should. They love the product and the organization, but the organization hasn’t reciprocated. It hasn’t supported them at times when they have been out there; they haven’t been able to depend on the Tor organization. Sometimes there isn’t a lot that can be done to help, but sometimes there is.”

A survey of 130 Tor staff and volunteers in September 2015 reported: “The Tor community self-reports as being overworked and stressed.

“Contributing factors include worry about people’s personal privacy and security, unhappiness about what they felt was bad behaviour in the Tor community, and a lack of job security and access to healthcare and other benefits,” it found.

Steele says some of those things are problems she can fix as executive director.

“One of the key things is to build up the organizational side of Tor. Tor already is producing amazing products. And the technologists who are working at Tor are really, really bright. They didn’t need someone to come in there and restructure that. What they really need is someone to build the support system so they can all be focused on doing their good work. Stuff like bank accounts, health insurance, raising money.”

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The survey also found that Tor’s funding model was a big point of concern for staff, with many concerned that a single funding source from the US government makes Tor’s future vulnerable and damages its credibility. “A third [of those surveyed are] saying the Tor Project should probably aim to entirely stop taking US government money. People internal to Tor are likelier than external people to say they don’t like the US government funding model.”

Steele agrees that Tor’s funding model so far has been unusual. For a tool that advertises itself as capable of government circumvention, the appearance of funding itself mostly with US government grants is bad. Tor advertises on its homepage that Edward Snowden used Tor to protect himself from the most technically proficient adversary on the planet – the US National Security Agency. Steele says there are many other funding models to explore for Tor.

“They have built the organisation around a university research model where they fund specific projects and have to have separate budgets for each of the projects they’re working on … It’s not by any remote stretch of the imagination the way a traditional non-profit is funded,” she said.

Despite being a registered non-profit organization, Tor hasn’t been getting as much money from individuals, foundations, from corporate donors, from running events, or other schemes. “There is a whole world of funding opportunities that they haven’t even explored. And I agree – it actually makes Tor very vulnerable.”

Steele spoke modestly and only briefly during Tor’s keynote speech to the 3,500 people at the event, acknowledging that her priority would be to diversify its funding sources. “Government funding has been really difficult for us, specifically because it’s all restricted and so it limits the kinds of things we want to do. When you get the developers in a room blue-skying about the things that they want to do, it’s incredible – these are really brilliant people who want to do great things. But they’re really limited when the funding says they have to do particular things.”

Steele introduced a funding drive that has raised $170,000 so far, including the obligatory slogan T-shirt: “This is what a Tor supporter looks like,” it says.

Wendy Seltzer, who has been on Tor’s board since the organization was founded as a non-profit, says that Shari can be behind the scenes and yet everywhere at the same time, consistent and powerful.



“For example, the way she supported the legal team at EFF was by doing lots of things that needed to be done but weren’t the sexy out-front things. She gives people the support they need to go out and do those things. She’s not afraid of being out of the limelight when it’s necessary and letting others move forward as they see fit. Bringing those strengths to Tor and continuing to enable Roger, Jake and Nick, Mike, Karsten and Isabella and all of the team to go out and develop the technology and advocate for its use, and build the product, she will help to – more than keep things running – to move things forward.”

Despite her deliberate low profile, Steele bears a significant burden: to fix an organization that many people see as integral to the architecture of a free internet, yet is straining to keep up with the financial and technical demands on its resources. “I’m ready,” Steele says about the challenge ahead. “I still have some fight left in me.”