We started our own transit Internet Service Provider (ISP) to safely route anonymized packets across the globe, and you can too. Emerald Onion is a Seattle-based 501(c)3 not-for-profit and we want to help other hacker collectives start their own. Getting your own Autonomous System Number (ASN), managing Internet Protocol (IP) scopes, using Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) in Internet Exchange Points (IXPs), dealing with abuse complaints or government requests for user data -- this is all stuff that you can do. Not every technologist is comfortable with launching and managing a nonprofit organization let alone has all of the technical knowhow to run an ISP. We didn't either when we started. We had a goal, and that was to route unfiltered Tor exit traffic in the Seattle Internet Exchange despite National Security Agency (NSA) wiretaps in the Westin Exchange Building. This talk will cover high level challenges and opportunities surrounding privacy infrastructure in the United States.
yawnbox is the co-founder and executive director for Emerald Onion and has a background in network administration, datacenter operations, and security engineering. He has been running Tor guard and middle relays since 2010 and exit relays since 2012. Being a victim of domestic violence at a young age, yawnbox has been acutely aware of physical location metadata since the age of 8 and has been researching, publishing, and training at-risk communities about threat modeling and operational security since becoming a part of the Tor community. In 2013, yawnbox got involved with political activism through the Seattle Privacy Coalition, and in 2015 performed an internship with the ACLU of Washington where he helped roll out the first instance of SecureDrop in a non-journalist organization. In 2016, yawnbox was brought on as Tor Project's first full time Grant Writer but left shortly after.