How Shari Steele Plans To Take Tor Mainstream

blottsie writes: Over her career, Shari Steel has taken on United States Department of Justice, the National Security Agency, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. She built the Electronic Frontier Foundation into an international powerhouse for protecting online rights. Today, she has a new mission, perhaps her heaviest challenge yet: Take the Internet's most powerful privacy tool mainstream. From the Daily Dot article linked, a hint of one reason that bringing Tor mainstream isn't straightforward: At the heart of Tor's image problems are what's known as "hidden services" -- sites that are only accessible through the Tor network. Hidden services have been home to drug and gun marketplaces, child pornography forums, fraud and hacking sites, and sites where you can place bets on when a high-profile target may be assassinated. While the media tends to focus on the nefarious elements Tor enables, hidden services make up only about 1 percent of the Tor network, according to Steele, and are in no way operated by the Tor Project.

"I'm trying to teach everyone that we need to recognize that we are doing the work of the angels," Steele says. "What we are providing is really important and really great, and there happen to be uses that are residual that aren't what we're doing. We're not creating this for [illegal activity]. And OK, maybe it's being used for that, but that's not what we're about!"