Tor Project Launches World-wide Search for New Executive Director

To repeat something from another thread: from the perspective of one Tor user:

I suggest that the ideal candidate [for Exec Director of Tor Project] would be:

o known personally to at least some core Tor developers,

o known by reputation to many Tor users,

o possess an impeccable record of pro-democracy, pro-human rights, pro-privacy advocacy,

o possess proven executive skills, because growth is unavoidable but must be carefully controlled to avoid fragmentation (something our enemies will seek to promote, so watch out),

o a strong technical background, especially in software development, would very desirable but possibly not as important as the above desiderata; however, I think that candidates must clearly appreciate that in the end the people who are truly *essential* for the success of the Project are the developers, not the executives, media reps, or lobbyists (if any),

o lack of "baggage" which could be used by our enemies to harm the Project, such as substantial previous employment for USG, especially USIC agencies or contractors,

o lack of visible inclination to move on to another job after only a few years.

Afterthought:

o demonstrated ability to maintain friendly relations with leaders of teams and allied projects

I had hoped to see more public discussion of where the Project is or ought to be heading. FWIW here are a few more thoughts from the perspective of one Tor user:

o clearly, the Project will grow in budget, employees, user base, and visibility; it will be critical to manage this growth to avoid undesirable consequences of rapid growth,

o I was going to suggest "modularize" along functional lines, but its seems the Project was already thinking the same thing (to judge from the recent news about reorganizing into functional teams), so that's good (unless we are all wrong about the virtues of modularization),

o one advantage of functional teams is that if one bit really takes off and proves useful to many other projects and needs to itself grow rapidly, possibly it could be forked into a separate but closely related project,

o I also suggest continually revisiting the question of how much (if anything) to invest in lobbying of key governments (US, EU, Iceland) and media relations; in the past I advocated more of this as the budget grows and it seems that here too others were already thinking along similar lines,

o smaller, nimbler, more geographically diverse organizations could possibly help defend against USG threats abusing recently passed for forthcoming anti-anonymity/privacy/security legislation, but could lead to many organizations competing for the same small pool of donor funds--- the best I can suggest is to point out that some NGOs garnered generous gifts which they used to form stable endowment funds,

o I hope the next Executive Director will take seriously the possibility that the US Congress will actually outlaw Tor (although at present most observers seem to think this is unlikely, I fear it could happen in a late night vote when only a few members are present, or be tacked on to some other bill without any members noticing), and will have in place a workable plan to move the project on an emergency basis to a less unsafe refuge from dictatorships than the USA,

o to the extent possible, I hope the next Executive Director will attempt to foster the convergent evolution of Tor, Tails, Whonix, Qubes, Tor-ramdisk, LEAP, and other privacy-enhancing projects; that is, even when the code base diverges, everyone should try to incorporate the most useful/powerful functional abilities, in particular the best encryption,

o one particular thing I'd like to see more of, precisely because it so obviously terrifies our enemies (so it must be a good direction to go in, yes?), is steganography,

o another thing I want to see ASAP is the best anti-stylometry we can find (does it not help that Roger's wife wrote a leading candidate for the first deployable anti-stylometry software?); this is a hard problem worthy of a team, or perhaps Tor helping to set up a separate project, ideally not relying too heavily on funding from hostile agencies like IARPA or DARPA,

o I also worry that in practice security-aware journalists/activists are relying too much on AES (for example in Tails options for encrypting essential data USBs) and would like to see the Project moving to encourage development and standardization of alternatives; ECC (with a good PRNG) is one obvious choice, but possibly modern lattice systems are worth serious exploration; one suggestion is not to wait for the USG but to get together (cautiously) with big bad industry leaders (Google, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft etc) to sponsor another crypto contest like the one which lead to choosing Rijndael for AES standard.