Nathanial Freitas
Founder And Director at Guardian Project
Brookline, Massachusetts, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolNathanial Freitas is a founder and director with over two decades in mobile communications security, leading Guardian Project to build open-source privacy tools used by human rights defenders and activists. Based in Brookline, MA, he blends hands-on engineering with product and infrastructure leadership, contributing significant security and proxy integrations to projects like Orbot and NetCipher. His background spans startups, academia and government—founding ThinAirApps (acquired by PalmOne), teaching at NYU ITP, and advising open data initiatives for the New York State Senate—demonstrating a talent for bridging research, policy and product. A full-stack developer comfortable with native Android, JNI/database internals, and DevOps, he’s fixed deep UX and encryption issues in ChatSecure and added Bluetooth and SQLCipher support across clients. Notably, his work often targets hard problems at the intersection of usability and strong security, shipping pragmatic solutions for constrained mobile environments. He couples entrepreneurial instinct with long-form open-source stewardship and a creative-arts background in music composition.
17 years of coding experience
12 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Arts in Creative Studies Music Composition (Art Music Direct Digital/Software Synthesis), Bachelor of Arts in Creative Studies Music Composition (Art Music Direct Digital/Software Synthesis) at UC Santa Barbara
Stackoverflow
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Github Skills (34)
ssl10
tls1210
mobile-development10
sqlite10
proxy10
user-interface10
bluetooth-le10
proxy-server10
tls1310
android-development10
network-programming10
java10
security10
android-developer10
javas10
Programming languages (23)
Github contributions (5)
guardianproject/orbot-android
Oct 2009 - Jan 2023
The Github home of Orbot: Tor on Android (Also available on gitlab!)
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer & DevOps Engineer
Back-end Developer & DevOps EngineerContributions:103 releases, 16 reviews, 2540 commits in 13 years 5 months
Contributions summary:Nathanial contributed to the codebase by implementing features to enhance the Orbot service for Android, which is a Tor-based service. The commits involved adding new functionalities to enhance service stability, code improvements and features such as a "New Identity" button. The user also worked on updates for the pluggable transport mechanism, and on implementing and testing the new proxy features, as well as building and configuring infrastructure support for those features.
androidgitlabtorcensorship-circumventionanonymity
guardianproject/ChatSecureAndroid
Dec 2010 - Sep 2016
This project has ended, but ChatSecure iOS continues. For Android, please use Conversations or Zom instead
Role in this project:Mobile Developer (Android)
Mobile Developer (Android)Contributions:1 release, 2088 commits, 49 PRs in 5 years 10 months
Contributions summary:Nathanial primarily contributed to the Android version of the ChatSecure app, focusing on fixing bugs and improving the UI and user experience. Their commits address issues related to session handling, message display, and OTR encryption state within the conversation view. They also implemented features like adding new photo and audio sharing, and addressed issues related to the account setup process.
androidios
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