About
Emerald Onion is a U.S. 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization and transit internet service provider (ISP) based in Seattle, WA. Emerald Onion's mission is to protect privacy, anonymity, access to information, and free speech online. To further that mission, Emerald Onion operates high capacity, unfiltered Tor exit relays with direct peering to the Seattle Internet Exchange, the Fremont Cabal Internet Exchange, and the Berlin Commercial Internet Exchange. Emerald Onion envisions a world where access and privacy are the defaults; if we do not have human rights online, we will not have them offline, either.
Network
Emerald Onion's Autonomous System Numbers (ASN) is 396507.
Volunteer Directors
Christopher Sheats (he/they, @yawnbox)
yawnbox is a privacy and security engineer, and a cypherpunk. He has been a Tor educator and relay operator since 2010, and was Tor Project's first full-time grant writer in early 2016. yawnbox's volunteerism has also included work with the Seattle Privacy Coalition, City of Seattle's Community Technology Advisory Board, and the ACLU of Washington. yawnbox presented Emerald Onion to DEF CON 26 in August 2018.
Will Scott, PhD (@willscott)
Will is a research fellow at the University of Michigan studying Internet security and access. His work includes Satellite, a project scanning the internet for DNS censorship, and Onionproxy for routing public email to location-hidden services. A Seattle native, Will's previous experiences have included teaching skiing, living in China, working on the Gmail and Jigsaw teams at Google, teaching Computer Science in Pyongyang, and playing with fire.
Jake Visser (@jakevis_)
Jake is a cyber security architect living and working in Seattle. An Australian native, with a long history in government, IT security, and many forms of packet forwarding (and a couple masters degrees from the University of New South Wales to help). Jake has been involved with several not for profits, ranging from long range community wireless networks, community ISP’s to other Defcon community groups.
Matt McCoy, Esq.
Matt is an attorney in Seattle practicing in privacy and security law who advises in niche technology matters such as cyberstalking, Tor exit node operation, and other information security issues. Matt has worked at places such as the FTC’s Department of Privacy and Identity Protection, the ACLU of Washington, the Senate Consumer Protection and Data Security, and as a Google Policy Fellow. He helped author State of Washington E.O. 16-01 (PDF) which created Washington’s Office of Privacy and Data Protection, and has worked on technology policy with federal, state, and local governments.
Volunteer Advisory Board
Shawn Webb (@lattera)
Shawn is an offensive and defensive security researcher, with over a decade of experience in the field. Primarily on the defensive side, Shawn co-founded HardenedBSD and sits on the core team. Shawn's most well-known offensive research is libhijack, a post-exploitation tool that makes runtime process infection easy on FreeBSD. An avid fan of Tor, he runs a public relay on a Raspberry Pi 3 running HardenedBSD. In fact, his home is wired for Tor. Plug in a device and all its traffic magically goes through Tor!
John Brooks (@jbrooks_)
John is the lead developer of Ricochet, an infrastructure-less chat program built on the Tor network and focused on ease of use. John has contributed to Tor's Onion Service specification and development. He is otherwise unremarkable and enjoys his anonymity, and lack of hassling at borders.
Paul English (@penglish1)
Paul is CEO of PreOS Security Inc and is a board member for the League of Professional System Administrator, a nonprofit professional association for the advancement of the practice of system administration from 2015 through 2017. Paul has a bachelor's degree in computer science from Worcester Polytechnic Institute obtained in 1998. He has been a UNIX & Linux system administrator and wearer of many other IT hats since 1996. More recently he has managed a few sysadmins while still racking the occasional server. In 2016, Paul ventured into a firmware security startup to help sysadmins keep their systems safe from new threats.
Wilton Gorske (@wiltongorske)
Wilton is a FOSS, encryption, and privacy advocate in his spare time. His interest in actively running relays for the Tor network piqued in 2013 after global surveillance disclosures came to light. Wilton is particularly passionate about communicating the importance of privacy technology in everyday life in a way that is understandable and practical to the general public as well as activists and organizers working towards progressive change in an increasingly hostile surveillance state and economy.
Nate Sales (@natesales)
Nate is a student and software developer with a focus on infrastructure and security. He works on many layers of the stack but most often likes ensuring packets arrive at their intended destination and writing software to make that job easier. Nate manages the software department at Team 1540, building autonomous robot control code. He also enjoys Linux, BSD and radio communication.
Brendan McMillion
Brendan is a cryptography engineer that focuses on developing and deploying standards that make the whole Internet safer. His experience includes building the first major TLS 1.3 deployment at Cloudflare and operating Certificate Transparency logs that are trusted in Chrome. He believes end-to-end encryption should be ubiquitous and is currently working on more secure and efficient encryption protocols to support that goal.
