Announcing Tor’s Next Executive Director: Isabela Bagueros

I don't think anyone suggested that there are any "guarantees" anywhere in sight. Given the insidious scheming and the vicious nature of our well-funded enemies, in the Tor community we must deal rather with estimated probabilities of sincerity and good faith.

First, IMO it is not unreasonable to expect that someone who belongs to or has close ties to one or more subpopulations which has experienced discrimination or worse, is more likely, in general, to be sympathetic to our issues and to treat human rights concerns with the respect they deserve. On that basis, female gender, in connection with other positive signs, is encouraging.

Second, as ED, Shari had to deal with a truly horrid human resources mess and some very bad publicity about alleged misbehavior by a former employee--- fallout from things which happened before she took the job. I believe the ultimate cause of those problems was that no-one had been paying much attention to creating a well thought out code of conduct or even such human resources basics as how to fire someone for lying on their job application about the nature of their previous employment. Going forward, TP needs to recruit widely, especially among young techies, to obtain the best talent early in their careers (we hope a stint at TP will help nurture attitudes which the tech industry generally badly needs to foster, including a respect for customer privacy and a willingness to speak out against mistreatment in the workplace), and the fact that the new ED happens to be female will surely help attract qualified female applicants, which doubles the talent pool.

Third, TP is quite properly engaged in outreach to nations and communities which need Tor but have so far not been able to take advantage of it as much as they need to do. If you have been following the political turmoil in Brazil, and the reports issued by human rights groups on police killings in Rio--- if you've seen those you will appreciate that they are one of the best arguments why US politicians need to respond positively and promptly to the justice reform and BLM movements, because the alternative is allowing US cities to slide closer and closer to the shocking and abhorrent situation in Rio--- you will understand why I and others feel that Brazilians need Tor and lots of it. Simply by being Brazilian, Isa can immediately gain some credibility in Brazil. Further, I imagine that some Brazilian media orgs will be intrigued to learn that a Brazilian is the new ED of Tor Project, and that could provide an opportunity for TP to try to garner some much needed press attention which is not of the customary Tor-bashing tripe which too many US mass media companies routinely feed their unfortunate readers. (Because Glenn Greenwald happens to live in Rio and is certainly no friend to USIC, I have high hopes that The Intercept may run a balanced profile of TP.)

Fourth, anyone who has followed this blog for five years or more knows that a harmful and false meme often pushed in comments incorrectly claims that "TP is a USG surveillance operations" [sic], and the simple fact that the new ED happens not to be American by birth should help convince many doubters that TP is a human rights organization which is not controlled by the USG.

That said, it seems clear that until TP can create a funding model with drastically reduced reliance on USG grants, TP remains vulnerable to *manipulation* by USG. Even worse, as the ex-CIA coder scandal showed, TP is vulnerable to what looks very much like attempted infiltration by USG "moles". So TP needs to acknowledge these dangers and to work to minimize them.

If you only meant to say that in general, women may not be much less likely to be bad actors as men--- CIA torture queen Gina Haspell being a case in point--- I'd have to agree that this is a valid point worth bearing in mind. But we are living in a global police state, in which nothing whatsoever is guaranteed. Our best friend, even our spouse, may be informing on us to the secret police. Our colleague, the well-liked Save the Children national director in PK might be a CIA "asset". A self-styled "reporter" or filmmaker might be a military intelligence operative or an FBI agent. All those things have happened, in the last decade, to political advocacy, social justice, and environmental groups. Such possibilities are among the unpleasant realities which activists must deal with on a daily basis.

The only rational response appears to be to think in terms of estimated likelihoods rather than "known facts". Because the USG has done such a thorough job of creating a global order in which no facts, anywhere, anytime, about anything, can really be considered "known" to be true. This situation is certainly abhorrent, and is indeed a major reason why we must oppose odious USG scheming, but we cannot ignore the reality USG has created (with lots of help from RU and CN govts, to be sure). But until such dangerous and uncontrollable horrors as nuclear weapons, intelligence agencies, secret police agencies, state sponsored jailers, torturers and executioners, "state secrets", plutocracies, and monopolies, are all eliminated, we must always remain alert to the possibility that anything we encounter might not be what it seems, and to try to use the limited information available to assess the likelihood that someone is trying to trick us.

Example: some sidebar on a news website we like urges us to take a "personality quiz". An amusing and harmless distraction from some human rights horror we are investigating? Or a technocrat with ties to the secret police agencies of several nations trying to trick us into revealing something which can be used to harm us? Hard to say, so it would be the better part of wisdom to ignore the quiz, however harmless and appealing it might seem. And as the Cambridge Analytica scandal shows, this would be the right decision: someone working for dubious entities *was* trying to trick us.

So IMO it is reasonable to be encouraged by such characteristics as female and non-American. Or in other words, we must learn to continually reassess our judgments in response to new information, to continually question every hidden assumption, without becoming so paranoid about CIA and their kind that we turn into some kind of counter-Angleton.

Best of luck Isabela!