Kevin Bankston is the Policy Director of the New America Foundation's Open Technology Institute, where he works in the public interest to promote policy and regulatory reforms to strengthen communities by supporting open communications networks, platforms, and technologies, with a focus on issues of Internet surveillance and censorship. Prior to leading OTI's policy team, Kevin was a Senior Counsel and the Director of the Free Expression Project at the Center for Democracy & Technology. From that position, he spent two years advocating on a wide range of Internet and technology policy issues both international and domestic, most recently organizing a broad coalition of companies and civil society organizations to demand greater transparency around the US government's surveillance practices. Prior to joining CDT, he worked for nearly a decade at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, specializing in free speech and privacy law with a focus on government surveillance, Internet privacy, and location privacy. As a Senior Staff Attorney at EFF, he regularly litigated issues surrounding free expression and electronic surveillance, and was a lead counsel in EFF's lawsuits against the National Security Agency and AT&T, challenging the legality of the NSA warrantless wiretapping program first revealed in 2005. He received his JD at the University of Southern California Law School after receiving his BA at the University of Texas at Austin.