Relax and enjoy in an evening lounge while you get the latest information about how the law is racing to catch up with technological change from staffers at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the nation's premiere digital civil liberties group fighting for freedom and privacy in the computer age. This Evening Lounge discussion will include updates on current EFF issues such as surveillance online, encryption (and backdoors), and fighting efforts to use intellectual property claims to shut down free speech and halt innovation, discussion of our technology project to protect privacy and speech online, updates on cases and legislation affecting security research, and much more.
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. 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. Grokster and 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 Court appeal. In 2014, Opsahl was elected to the USENIX Board of Directors. @kurtopsahl, @eff
NATE CARDOZO is a Senior Staff Attorney on the Electronic Frontier Foundation's digital civil liberties team. In addition to his focus on free speech and privacy litigation, Nate works on EFF's Who Has Your Back? report and Coders' Rights Project. Nate has projects involving cryptography and the law, automotive privacy, government transparency, hardware hacking rights, anonymous speech, electronic privacy law reform, Freedom of Information Act litigation, and resisting the expansion of the surveillance state. A 2009-2010 EFF Open Government Legal Fellow, Nate spent two years in private practice before returning to his senses and to EFF in 2012. Nate has a B.A. in Anthropology and Politics from U.C. Santa Cruz and a J.D. from U.C. Hastings where he has taught first-year legal writing and moot court. He brews his own beer, has been to India four times, and watches too much Bollywood.
EVA GALPERIN is EFF's Director of Cybersecurity. Prior to 2007, when she came to work for EFF, Eva worked in security and IT in Silicon Valley and earned degrees in Political Science and International Relations from SFSU. Her work is primarily focused on providing privacy and security for vulnerable populations around the world. To that end, she has applied the combination of her political science and technical background to everything from organizing EFF's Tor Relay Challenge, to writing privacy and security training materials (including Surveillance Self Defense and the Digital First Aid Kit), and publishing research on malware in Syria, Vietnam, Kazakhstan. When she is not collecting new and exotic malware, she practices aerial circus arts and learning new languages.
SHAHID BUTTAR is EFF’s Director of Grassroots Advocacy, who leads EFF's grassroots and student outreach efforts, including the organizing the Electronic Frontier Alliance. 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. After graduating from Stanford Law School in 2003, where he grew immersed in the movement to stop the war in Iraq, Shahid worked for a decade in Washington, D.C. He first worked in private practice for a large California-based law firm, with public interest litigation projects advancing campaign finance reform, and marriage equality for same-sex couples as early as 2004, when LGBT rights remained politically marginal. From 2005 to 2008, he helped build a national progressive legal network and managed the communications team at the American Constitution Society for Law & Policy, and in 2008 and 2009 he founded the program to combat racial & religious profiling at Muslim Advocates. Outside of work, Shahid 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.
KIT WALSH is a staff attorney at EFF, working on free speech, net neutrality, copyright, coders' rights, and other issues that relate to freedom of expression and access to knowledge. She has worked for years to support the rights of political protesters, journalists, remix artists, and technologists to agitate for social change and to express themselves through their stories and ideas. Prior to joining EFF, Kit led the civil liberties and patent practice areas at the Cyberlaw Clinic, part of Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society, and previously Kit worked at the law firm of Wolf, Greenfield & Sacks, litigating patent, trademark, and copyright cases in courts across the country. Kit holds a J.D. from Harvard Law School and a B.S. in neuroscience from MIT, where she studied brain-computer interfaces and designed cyborgs and artificial bacteria.