Presented at
DEF CON 14 (2006),
Aug. 6, 2006, noon
(50 minutes).
If you want to know how the National Security Agency and telecommunications companies are conspiring to invade your privacy, this is the panel for you. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is currently suing AT&T for collaborating with the NSA in its massive and illegal program to wiretap and data-mine Americans' phone and internet communications. Come learn about the legal and technical issues surrounding the NSA surveillance program, find out what Congress is (or isn't) doing about it, and get an up-to-the-minute update from the EFF lawyers on their lawsuit and other NSA-related court cases across the country.
Presenters:
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Cindy Cohn
- EFF Legal Director
Cindy Cohn is the Legal Director for the Electronic Frontier Foundation as well as its General Counsel. She is responsible for overseeing the EFF's overall legal strategy and supervising EFF's 7 staff attorneys. Outside the Courts, Ms. Cohn has testified before Congress, been featured in the New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle and elsewhere for her work on cyberspace issues, interviewed on the BBC, NPR, CNN, CBS News and the Newshour, Economist, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post and many other online and offline media outlets. In 1997, as a result of her work on Internet issues, Ms. Cohn was named as one of the "Lawyers of the Year" by California Lawyer magazine. In 2001, Ms. Cohn and the EFF were honored by the Editorial Board of Daily Journal.
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Kevin Bankston
- EFF Staff Attorney
Kevin Bankston, an EFF staff attorney specializing in free speech and privacy law, was EFF's Equal Justice Works/Bruce J. Ennis Fellow for 2003-05. His fellowship project focused on the impact of post-9/11 anti-terrorism laws and surveillance initiatives on online privacy and free expression. Before joining EFF, Kevin was the Justice William J. Brennan First Amendment Fellow for the American Civil Liberties Union in New York City. At the ACLU, Kevin litigated Internet-related free speech cases, including First Amendment challenges to both the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (Edelman v. N2H2, Inc.) and a federal statute regulating Internet speech in public libraries (American Library Association v. U.S.). Kevin received his J.D. in 2001 from the University of Southern California Law Center, and received his undergraduate degree from the University of Texas in Austin.
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Kurt Opsahl
- EFF Staff Attorney
Kurt Opsahl is a Staff Attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation focusing on civil liberties, free speech and privacy law. 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.
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Jason Schultz
- EFF Staff Attorneys
Jason Schultz is a Staff Attorney specializing in intellectual property and reverse engineering. He currently leads EFF's Patent Busting Project. Jason also teaches graduate classes on Cyberlaw at UC Berkeley's Boalt Hall School of Law and School of Information. Prior to joining EFF, Schultz worked at the law firm of Fish & Richardson P.C., where he spent most of his time invalidating software patents and defending open source developers in law suits. While at F&R, he co-authored an amicus brief on behalf of the Internet Archive, Prelinger Archives, and Project Gutenberg in support of Eric Eldred's challenge to the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act. Prior to F&R, Schultz served as a law clerk to the Honorable D. Lowell Jensen and as a legal intern to the Honorable Ronald M. Whyte, both in the Northern District of California federal court system. During law school, Schultz served as Managing Editor of the Berkeley Technology Law Journal and helped found the Samuelson Clinic, the first legal clinic in the country to focus on high tech policy issues and the public interest. Schultz also has undergraduate degrees in Public Policy and Women's Studies from Duke University. Jason maintains a personal blog at lawgeek.net.
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