Panel: Ask the EFF: The Year in Digital Civil Liberties Kurt Opsahl Deputy General Counsel, Electronic Frontier Foundation Nate Cardozo EFF Staff Attorney Mark Jaycox EFF Legislative Analyst Yan Zhu EFF Staff Technologist Eva Galperin EFF Global Policy Analyst
KURT OPSAHL is the Deputy General Counsel of the Electronic Frontier Foundation focusing on civil liberties, free speech and privacy law. Opsahl has counseled numerous computer security researchers on their rights to conduct and discuss research. 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. 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, which established the reporter’s privilege for online journalists. In addition to his work at EFF, Opsahl is a member of the USENIX Board of Directors.
NATE CARDOZO is a 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 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.
EVA GALPERIN is EFFs Global Policy Analyst, and has been instrumental in highlighting government malware designed to spy upon activists around the world. A lifelong geek, Eva misspent her youth working as a Systems Administrator all over Silicon Valley. Since then, she has seen the error of her ways and earned degrees in Political Science and International Relations from SFSU. She comes to EFF from the US-China Policy Institute, where she researched Chinese energy policy, helped to organize conferences, and attempted to make use of her rudimentary Mandarin skills.
MARK JAYCOX is a Legislative Analyst for EFF. His issues include user privacy, civil liberties, surveillance law, and "cybersecurity." When not reading legal or legislative documents, Mark can be found reading non-legal and legislative documents, exploring the Bay Area, and riding his bike. He was educated at Reed College, spent a year abroad at the University of Oxford (Wadham College), and concentrated in Political History. The intersection of his concentration with advancing technologies and the law was prevalent throughout his education, and Mark's excited to apply these passions to EFF. Previous to joining EFF, Mark was a Contributor to ArsTechnica, and a Legislative Research Assistant for LexisNexis.
YAN ZHU is a Staff Technologist with EFF. Yan writes code and words to enable pervasive encryption and protect Internet users' privacy. Besides maintainingHTTPS Everywhere at EFF, she is a core developer ofSecureDrop and founder of the Worldwide Aaron Swartz Memorial Hackathon Series. In her spare time, Yan writes about the intersection of computer security and humansand tries to find interesting ways to break web applications. She holds a B.S. in Physics from MIT and was a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow at Stanford.
Twitter: @eff Twitter: @kurtopsahl