Join staffers at the Electronic Frontier Foundation—the nation's premier digital civil liberties group fighting for freedom and privacy in the computer age—for a candid chat about how the law is racing to catch up with technological change.
Then meet representatives from Electronic Frontier Alliance allied community and campus organizations from across the country. These technologists and advocates are working within their communities to educate and empower their neighbors in the fight for data privacy and digital rights.
This discussion will include updates on current EFF issues such as the government's effort to undermine encryption (and add backdoors), the fight for network neutrality, discussion of our technology projects to spread encryption across the Web and emails, updates on cases and legislation affecting security research, and much more.
Half the session will be given over to question-and-answer, so it's your chance to ask EFF questions about the law, surveillance and technology issues that are important to you.
Kurt Opsahl is the Deputy Executive Director and General Counsel of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. In addition to representing clients on civil liberties, free speech and privacy law, Opsahl counsels on EFF projects and initiatives. Opsahl is the lead attorney on the Coders' Rights Project, and is representing several companies who are challenging National Security Letters. Before joining EFF, Opsahl worked at Perkins Coie, where he represented technology clients with respect to intellectual property, privacy, defamation, and other online liability matters, including working on Kelly v. Arribasoft, MGM v. Groksterand CoStar v. LoopNet. For his work responding to government subpoenas, Opsahl is proud to have been called a "rabid dog" by the Department of Justice. Prior to Perkins, Opsahl was a research fellow to Professor Pamela Samuelson at the U.C. Berkeley School of Information Management & Systems. Opsahl received his law degree from Boalt Hall, and undergraduate degree from U.C. Santa Cruz. Opsahl co-authored "Electronic Media and Privacy Law Handbook." In 2007, Opsahl was named as one of the "Attorneys of the Year" by California Lawyer magazine for his work on the O'Grady v. Superior Courtappeal. In 2014, Opsahl was elected to the USENIX Board of Directors.
Camille Fischer is a Frank Stanton Fellow working on EFF’s free speech and government transparency projects. Camille came to EFF from D.C. where she worked in the Obama White House and in the Department of Commerce advocating for civil, human rights, and due process protections in national security and law enforcement policies. She also ran projects to increase consumer security and privacy, like the move to chip cards (sorry not sorry), and has war stories about ECPA Reform, MLATs, and encryption. Camille graduated from Georgetown University Law Center and the University of Georgia (Go Dawgs). She takes pics and bakes pies.
Bennett is an engineer on the Tech Projects team, where he works on Privacy Badger and HTTPS Everywhere. Before EFF, Bennett was at Access Now and MIT, and he has a Master's of Engineering for work on privacy-preserving machine learning. He cares about privacy, transparency, data ownership, and digital equity. He wishes ad companies would kindly stop tracking everyone. Outside of work he has hobbies and likes fun.
As EFF's Grassroots Advocacy Organizer, nash works directly with community members and organizations to take advantage of the full range of tools provided by access to tech, while engaging in empowering action toward the maintenance of digital privacy and information security.
Shahid leads EFF's grassroots, student, and community outreach efforts. He's a constitutional lawyer focused on the intersection of community organizing and policy reform as a lever to shift legal norms, with roots in communities across the country resisting mass surveillance. From 2009 to 2015, he led the Bill of Rights Defense Committee as Executive Director. Outside of his work at EFF, Shahid also DJs and produces electronic music, writes poetry & prose, kicks rhymes, organizes guerilla poetry insurgencies, plays capoeira, speaks truth to power on Truthout, occasionally elucidates legal scholarship, and documents counter-cultural activism for the Burning Man Journal. He also serves on the Boards of Directors of Defending Rights and Dissent, the Center for Media Justice, and the Fund for Constitutional Government.