---
aliases:
- /about.html
- /about
title: About Us
---

**Michael Rogers** started the Briar project to support freedom of
expression, freedom of association and the right to privacy. He has
studied and built peer-to-peer systems for over a decade and contributed
to Freenet and LimeWire.

**Eleanor Saitta** is a hacker, designer, artist, writer, and barbarian.
She has been working as a security consultant since 2003, specializing
in security design and strategy, and makes a living and a vocation of
understanding how complex sociotechnical systems operate and redesigning
them to work, or at least fail, better.

**Torsten Grote** is a Free Software activist and programmer. He studied
computer science as well as philosophy and is interested in various
topics of technology-enabled social and political change. As a member of
the Free Software Foundation Europe, he ran their Free Your Android
campaign to show people how they can use their mobile device securely
and in freedom.

**Julian Dehm** is an advocate of freedom of speech and movement. He
studies computer science at Freie Universität Berlin with a focus on
security and privacy. He's contributing to Briar in his spare time and
is working on a funded project to improve Briar's battery usage and
message delivery even when contacts are not online at the same time.

**Ernir Erlingsson** has been building mobile applications on multiple
platforms for over a decade. He is a full stack developer, and an avid
supporter of open-source software, with a keen interest in theoretical
computer science and algorithms.

**Bernard Tyers** is an independent interaction designer and user
researcher. He is interested in privacy and applying user-centred design
to usable security. He is a long-time supporter of the Open Rights
Group, Tor and free software projects.

**Jack Grigg** is a core developer of the I2P anonymity network and lead
developer of I2P Android. He has a keen interest in privacy and
anonymity research, and enjoys helping other developers create
privacy-respecting software. He is also a budding UX enthusiast and
holds a PhD in Applied Physics from Lincoln University, New Zealand.

Briar has received funding from [Small
Media](https://smallmedia.org.uk/), the [Open Internet Tools
Project](https://web.archive.org/web/20160413063937/https://www.openitp.org/),
[Access](https://accessnow.org/), the [Open Technology
Fund](https://www.opentech.fund/), the [Prototype
Fund](https://prototypefund.de/), and
[Internews](https://www.internews.org/).

To contact the team, please email {{<contactemail>}}.