Tor Project hires Shari Steele, who led the EFF for 15 years, as its new executive director
Tor Hires a New Leader to Help It Combat the War on Privacy — The Tor Project is entering a crucial phase in its nearly 10-year existence. In the wake of the Edward Snowden leaks …
Context & Ripple Effects
Tor's leadership change caps a rapid institutional build-out in late 2015: weeks earlier the project had launched its first crowdfunding campaign, explicitly seeking to reduce its reliance on US government funds. Hiring Shari Steele — who ran the EFF for 15 years — imports two decades of nonprofit fundraising and advocacy experience into an organization suddenly thrust into the mainstream by the Snowden leaks.
The move reads less like a routine hire than a professionalization play: within months Steele would be talking publicly about changing public perception of Tor, the CMU attack, and diversifying funding sources, and the year that followed brought a full board overhaul. The arc runs all the way to 2024, when the Tor Project merged with Tails, becoming the umbrella body for more than one anonymity tool.
First-order effects
- Steele inherits an organization at a crucial phase of its nearly ten-year existence, with public scrutiny and usage both elevated in the wake of the Snowden leaks — her immediate job is reputation management on top of operations.
- The hire directly serves the funding pivot begun with the November crowdfunding campaign: Steele's EFF track record makes her the obvious person to broaden Tor's donor base beyond government grants.
Second-order effects
- Institutional pressure flows into governance: by mid-2016 the project replaces its entire board with figures including Bruce Schneier and Matt Blaze, following Jacob Appelbaum's resignation — a governance reset that pairs with the new directorate.
- A professionally led Tor raises the bar for peer privacy nonprofits, which face the same dual challenge of post-Snowden demand spikes and single-donor dependency.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, grassroots privacy projects evolve from loose volunteer collectives into structured institutions with boards, professional directors, and diversified revenue — a trajectory Tor itself completed by absorbing Tails under 'outgrown its existing structure' logic.
- Funding diversification becomes a resilience strategy for anonymity infrastructure specifically, since concentration on any single government patron is a standing target for critics of the network.
The trend: Privacy and anonymity infrastructure is shifting from volunteer-run projects dependent on government grants to professionally governed nonprofits with broadened funding bases.