Justin Hendrix
CEO and Editor – Tech Policy Press
Justin Hendrix is CEO and
Editor of Tech Policy Press, a nonprofit media venture concerned with the intersection of technology and democracy. He is an associate research scientist and adjunct professor at NYU Tandon School of Engineering, where he teaches a graduate course called Tech, Media and Democracy. Previously, Hendrix was Executive Director of NYC Media Lab, a public-private partnership between New York City’s media and technology industry and its universities to drive emerging media innovation and entrepreneurship. Before that, Hendrix spent almost a dozen years at The Economist, where he held a number of roles including Vice President, Business Development & Innovation, directing prototyping and commercialization of new digital media business concepts. Hendrix holds a Bachelor of Arts from the College of William & Mary and a Master of Science in Technology Commercialization from the McCombs School of Business, University of Texas at Austin. He lives in Brooklyn.
Amy Huffman
Policy Director – National Digital Inclusion Alliance
Amy joined NDIA in 2021. She is a public servant, systems thinker, innovative policy expert and storyteller with a passion for closing the digital divide and ensuring all Americans can thrive in the 21st century’s digital world. Amy has studied and worked in the digital inclusion field for 10 years. Prior to joining NDIA, Amy served as the State of North Carolina’s first digital inclusion and policy manager for the Broadband Infrastructure Office, a division of the Department of Information Technology. Amy’s interest in technology spans beyond broadband. For several years, she was a freelance writer and consultant, contributing to tech-focused publications where she covered North Carolina’s startup ecosystem. Amy holds a master’s degree in public administration and a bachelor’s degree in political science from UNC-Chapel Hill. Amy lives in Durham, NC with her son Grayson and dog, Finn.
Brandon Forester
Organizer – MediaJustice
Brandon is the National Organizer for Internet Rights at MediaJustice. Brandon has been an educator and organizer for over a decade working on a broad range of issue areas, geographic areas and campaign sizes from local community campaigns to nationwide days of action. He is a former founding member of the Global African Worker editorial collective, creating an intersectional space for thoughts and reflections for, about and by the Black diaspora and African peoples. Brandon is fighting for a just and liberated world where everyone has the opportunity to seek out a safe community and live out the full expression of their inherent dignity. He is originally from Wichita, Kansas and holds a B.A. in International Political Economy from the University of Puget Sound.
Ifeoma Ozoma
Founder and Principal – Earthseed
Ifeoma Ozoma is the Founder and Principal of Earthseed, a consulting firm advising individuals, organizations, and companies on the issues of tech accountability, public policy, health misinformation. She is a tech policy expert with experience leading global public policy partnerships, content safety development, and policymaker engagement at Pinterest, Facebook, and Google. Ifeoma is a co-sponsor of the Silenced No More Act. This legislation, authored by California State Senator Connie Leyva and signed into law by Governor Gavin Newsom, allows every individual in the state to share information about discrimination or harassment they have faced on the job, even after signing an NDA. Ifeoma is also the creator of The Tech Worker Handbook, a collection of resources for tech workers who are looking to make more informed decisions about whether to speak out on issues that are in the public interest. Ifeoma is currently leading a project to scale the protections in the Silenced No More Act to tens of thousands more workers via shareholder activism.
Yosef Getachew
Media and Democracy Program Director – Common Cause
Yosef Getachew serves as the Media & Democracy Program Director for Common Cause where he leads strategic campaigns to educate and engage the public and policymakers on critical reforms needed to advance an open and accessible media ecosystem. Prior to joining Common Cause, Yosef served as a Policy Fellow at Public Knowledge where he worked on a variety of technology and communications issues. His work focuses on promoting an open internet, broadband access and affordability, platform accountability, and media ownership.
Jennie Rose Halperin
Executive Director – Library Futures
Jennie is a digital strategist, community builder, commoner, and librarian who serves as Executive Director of Library Futures. She is focused on growing the organization and its reach and fostering a culture of open, inclusive leadership to support equitable digital library policy and advocacy. Jennie joins Library Futures from Harvard Law School Library, where she served as the Assistant Director for Outreach and Community Engagement. Previously, she managed communications for Creative Commons and worked on growth and community at O’Reilly Media and Mozilla. A committed civic leader, in 2018, she was chosen for Boston Mayor Marty Walsh’s SPARK Cohort for Millennial Leaders, and her work on the commons was awarded a Public Space Invitational Grant in 2019. Jennie received her MLS from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and her BA from Barnard College.
Caitlin Chin
Research Analyst – The Brookings Institution
Caitlin Chin is a research analyst at the Brookings Institution’s Center for Technology Innovation. At Brookings, she explores ways in which Congress and U.S. federal agencies can approach privacy, antitrust, and artificial intelligence policy in an equitable manner. In 2020, she co-authored “Bridging the gaps: A path forward to federal privacy legislation” with Cameron Kerry, John Morris, Jr., and Nicol Turner-Lee, which proposed a comprehensive middle-ground framework on U.S. federal privacy legislation.
Prior to joining Brookings, she completed the Google Public Policy Fellowship and Atlantic Media Fellowship programs and interned with the public policy departments at Verizon and VMware. She has a bachelor’s degree in government from the University of Maryland and a master’s degree in public policy from Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy. Her master’s thesis, “Examining national privacy laws in the context of international trade,” received a student paper award at the 48th Research Conference on Communications, Information, and Internet Policy (TPRC48).
Kendra Albert
Clinical Instructor – Harvard Law School Cyberlaw Clinic
Kendra Albert is a clinical instructor at the Cyberlaw Clinic at Harvard Law School, where they teach students to practice technology law by working with pro bono clients. Their practice areas include freedom of expression, computer security, and intellectual property law. They also founded and run the Initiative for a Representative First Amendment (IfRFA), which provides support to underrepresented law students interested in free expression. Kendra holds a law degree from Harvard Law School and serves on the board of the ACLU of Massachusetts and the Tor Project. They are also a legal advisor for Hacking // Hustling, a collective of sex workers, survivors, and accomplices working at the intersection of tech and social justice. In their free time, Kendra enjoys giving away other people’s money, making people in power uncomfortable, and playing video games.
Alisa Valentin
Special Advisor – Office of FCC Commissioner Geoffrey Starks
Alisa Valentin, Ph.D. advises FCC Commissioner Geoffrey Starks on broadband access and adoption matters that impact communities of color, low-income communities, and other marginalized groups. She also advises the Commissioner on matters related to the future of work and prison phone justice. Alisa joined the Commission from her position as the Communications Justice Fellow at Public Knowledge. Prior to her work at Public Knowledge, she served as a Legislative Fellow in the Office of Congresswoman Yvette D. Clarke (D-NY). She has also taught communications and women’s studies courses at Howard University, Trinity Washington University, Montgomery College, and Northern Virginia Community College. Alisa received her Ph.D. in Communications from Howard University. She also holds an M.S. in Journalism from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University and a B.S. in Telecommunications from the University of Florida.
Lydia X. Z. Brown
Policy Counsel, Privacy & Data – Center for Democracy & Technology
Lydia X.Z. Brown is a Policy Counsel with the Center for Democracy & Technology’s Privacy and Data Project, focused on disability rights and algorithmic fairness and justice. Their work has investigated algorithmic harm and injustice in public benefits determinations, hiring algorithms, and algorithmic surveillance that disproportionately impact disabled people, particularly multiply-marginalized disabled people. Outside of their work at CDT, Lydia teaches courses in disability studies, women’s and gender studies, and American studies at Georgetown University and American University. They are also the founding director of the Fund for Community Reparations for Autistic People of Color’s Interdependence, Survival, and Empowerment. Lydia serves on the American Bar Association’s Commission on Disability Rights, co-chairs the ABA Section on Civil Rights and Social Justice’s Disability Rights Committee, serves as co-president of the Disability Rights Bar Association, and represents the Disability Justice Committee on the National Lawyers Guild’s board. They love cats and also food.
Danielle Blunt
Co-Founder and Organizer – Hacking//Hustling
Danielle Blunt (she/her) is a sex worker, community organizer, a public health researcher and co-founder of Hacking//Hustling, a collective of sex workers and accomplices working at the intersection of tech and social justice to interrupt state surveillance and violence facilitated by technology. Blunt leads community-based participatory research on sex work and equitable access to technology from a public health perspective. Blunt is a Civic Media Fellow at USC’s Annenberg Innovation Lab where she is studying the financial discrimination of sex workers. She is also on the advisory board of Berkman Klein’s Initiative for a Representative First Amendment (IfRFA) and is one of the 2020 recipients of the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Pioneer Award.
Daiquiri Ryan
Co-Founder, Neta Collab
Strategic Legal Advisor & Policy Counsel, National Hispanic Media Coalition
Daiquiri Ryan is a Tejana and first-generation lawyer with a passion for social justice and technology. She is a new type of advocate, fusing her political and legal skills with digital-first movement-building, authentic storytelling, and strategic collective action.
In 2018, Daiquiri co-founded Neta Collab, a digital-first marketing and advocacy firm dedicated to advancing social justice causes and organizations. Every day through Neta, she helps shape social justice narratives in collaboration with clients making an impact in the environmental justice, voting rights, civil rights, and tech accountability spaces.
Daiquiri serves as Strategic Legal Advisor to the National Hispanic Media Coalition, where she uses her subject matter expertise in broadband access, net neutrality, platform accountability, media diversity, and other telecommunications and tech policy issues to advocate on behalf of the Latinx community.
Daiquiri enjoys cooking, musical theatre, and travelling with her partner, José, and their dog, Lupita.
Gaurav Laroia
Attorney Advisor to Commissioner Rebecca Kelly Slaughter at the Federal Trade Commission
Gaurav is an attorney-advisor for Commissioner Slaughter at the Federal Trade Commission where he works with her team on the consumer protection cases and policy issues that come before the Commission. Before joining her office hGaurav is an attorney-advisor for Commissioner Slaughter at the Federal Trade Commission where he works with her team on the consumer protection cases and policy issues that come before the Commission. Before joining her office he worked at Free Press on technology policy issues like civil rights and privacy, Net Neutrality, and tech and media competition. He has also worked at the Government Accountability Project, the American Civil Liberties Union, and on the House Foreign Affairs Committee and the Senate Judiciary Committee. He earned both his B.A. in international affairs and his J.D. from George Washington University.
Amanda Levendowski
Associate Professor of Law and Founding Director, Intellectual Property and Information Policy (iPIP) Clinic – Georgetown Law
Amanda Levendowski is a lawyer, teacher, and scholar focused on developing creative solutions to cutting-edge technological problems. In 2019, she founded the iPIP Clinic, which works with student attorneys to advise individuals, Amanda Levendowski is a lawyer, teacher, and scholar focused on developing creative solutions to cutting-edge technological problems. In 2019, she founded the iPIP Clinic, which works with student attorneys to advise individuals, nonprofits, and other organizations engaged with intellectual property and information policy matters from a public interest perspective. The creativity that informs her clinical work extends to her recent scholarship, which uses intellectual property law to tackle challenging issues, including nonconsensual pornography, biased artificial intelligence, secret surveillance technology, and invasive face surveillance. With Meg Leta Jones, she is also the co-editor of Feminist Cyberlaw (forthcoming 2024), which offers new ways to think about how gender, race, sexuality, and disability shape cyberspace and the laws that govern it. She lives in DC with her husband and cat.
April Glaser
Senior Internet Policy Research Fellow – The Technology and Social Change Project at Harvard University
April Glaser is an investigative journalist, most recently with NBC News where she reported on the technology industry aApril Glaser is an investigative journalist, most recently with NBC News where she reported on the technology industry and technology policy. Her award-winning journalism focuses on labor in Silicon Valley, digital surveillance, online harassment and consumer harms and has sparked congressional inquiries. Prior to NBC, April was a journalist and columnist at Slate, Recode and Wired. She previously worked at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. There she led the organization’s grassroots outreach and strategy on the campaign to pass network neutrality rules. April worked at Prometheus Radio Project to help pass the Local Community Radio Act, which marked the largest expansion of community radio in U.S. history and on media ownership reforms. She has written extensively about the history of social networks, technology policy, internet infrastructure and online harassment and is the co-founder of a community radio station in Nashville, Tennessee. She is currently a Senior Internet Policy Research Fellow at the Shorenstein Center at Harvard University.
Erik Johnson
Student – Miami University
Erik Johnson is a Computer Engineering & Information Security student at Miami University, focusing on Independent Privacy & Security Research.
Evan Greer
Director – Fight for the Future
Evan Greer (she/her) is an activist, writer, and musician based in Boston. She’s the director of the digital rights group Fight for the Future and writes regularly for outlets like the Washington Post, NBC News, and Wired. Her most recent album, “Spotify is Surveillance,” was featured in Rolling Stone and Pitchfork, and hit the very bottom of the Billboard charts 😉 Evan fights to ensure that technology and the policies governing it are a force for justice and liberation, rather than exploitation and tyranny.
Ayele B. Hunt
Campaign Strategies Director at Fight for the Future
Ayele B. Hunt is a Campaign Strategies Director at Fight for the Future and has been leading efforts to fight surveillance and data abuse. Prior to joining Fight for the Future, Ayele led grassroots advocacy fights for gender justice and reproductive rights.
Edyael Casaperalta
Senior Policy Advisor at USDA Rural Utilities Service
Edyael is Senior Policy Advisor at the Rural Utilities Service in the Department of Agriculture. She is an attorney who has supported indigenous, rural, and underserved communities in telecommunications matters. Most recently, she served as ACI Project Manager for AMERIND, where she supported the company’s efforts to bring high-speed broadband to Tribal Nations. Prior to that, she was a fellow at the American Indian Law Program at the University of Colorado Law School, a fellow at Public Knowledge, and led the Rural Broadband Policy Group at the Center for Rural Strategies. The RBPG was a national coalition of rural organizations advocating for high-speed, reliable, affordable broadband. She is proud to be from Elsa, Texas, a small border town in the Rio Grande Valley.
Bertram Lee Jr.
Counsel for Media and Technology – The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights
Bertram Lee is Counsel for Media and Tech at the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights where he works to advance the interests of marginalized communities in technology and media policy. His portfolio includes broadband access, media diversity, facial recognition, law enforcement surveillance technologies, Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, algorithmic bias, artificial intelligence, content moderation, and platform accountability.