Eleanor Saitta

Eleanor Saitta, who is a self-described barbarian, makes a living and a vocation of understanding how complex systems operate and redesigning them to work, or at least fail, better. Saitta’s transdisciplinary work makes use of everything from electronics, software, and paint to social rules and words as mediums for exploring and shaping our interactions with the world. Her focuses include the seamless integration of technology into the lived experience, the humanity of objects and the built environment, and systemic resilience and conviviality. Saitta is a member of the advisory boards at the International Modern Media Institute (IMMI), Freedom of the Press Foundation, Geeks Without Bounds (GWoB), the IFTF Governance Futures Lab, and the Calyx Institute; is part of the Trike and Briar/ Bramble software projects; and works as a freelance security architecture and strategy consultant to news organizations, NGOs, and software teams. She was previously Principal Security Engineer at the Open Internet Tools Project (OpenITP), directing the OpenITP Peer Review Board for open-source software and working on adversary modeling. Saitta also had a long career in the commercial security consulting space and co-founded both the Constitutional Analysis Support Team (CAST) and the Seattle-based Public N3rd Area hacker space.