Speakers

Amelia Andersdotter

Amelia represented the Swedish Pirate Party in the European Parliament between December 2011 and July 2014. She is involved with issues surrounding internet in society, and the different questions arising from its wide-spread adoption not only on a technical level, but also on a social, cultural and political level.

Amelia is a highly sought after international speaker and expert on topics pertaining to the internet, intellectual property and IT-policy. She is on the multi-stakeholder advisory group for the Internet Governance Forum at the UN since 2014. She was named one of the world's ten most important internet activists for the year 2012 for her work with the ACTA-agreement in the European Parliament.

Merrick Badger

Merrick Badger is an environmental and social justice activist and blogger.

In 2010 he was one of a group who investigated and exposed their comrade Mark Stone, aka police officer Mark Kennedy.

Since then he has worked been researching, campaigning and writing with Campaign Opposing Police Surveillance, an umbrella group for those who were spied on by Britain's political secret police.

Natalie Bennett

Natalie was elected leader of the Green Party in September 2012.

She was previously the Co-ordinator of Camden Greens and founding chair of the Green Party Women's Group.

You can find out about her work on her leader's blog, or contact her about Green Party matters through leader@greenparty.org.uk or get her on Twitter @natalieben 

Her personal blog, Philobiblon, dates back many years. 

Phil Booth

Phil coordinates medConfidential, which campaigns for confidentiality and consent in health and social care, seeking to ensure that every flow of patient data into, across and out of the NHS and care system is consensual, safe and transparent. 

Founded in early 2013, medConfidential works with patients and medics, service users and care professionals, drawing advice from networks of experts and partnering with related campaigns across the UK and around the world. 

Phil previously led NO2ID from 2004-2011, campaigning successfully to defeat the introduction of the Home Office ID scheme and other 'database state' initiatives. His work as an advocate has been recognised by awards from Privacy International (2008) and Liberty (2010).

Duncan Campbell

Duncan is an investigative journalist, author, consultant and television producer specialising in privacy, civil liberties and surveillance issues. His best-known investigations led to major legal clashes with successive British governments.

Duncan now also works, and is recognised as a forensic expert witness on computers and communications data.

He has provided specialist testimony in over a hundred criminal and civil cases, and has given evidence to the House of Commons and the European Parliament on surveillance legislation.

http://www.duncancampbell.org

Daniel Carey

Daniel is an associate solicitor who joined Deighton Pierce Glynn in 2013.

Previously, Daniel was a solicitor at Public Interest Lawyers. Before this he worked in Guatemala for Peace Brigades International and on US death penalty for Reprieve.

Daniel received the Law Society New Solicitor of the Year award in 2007 for his work in Guatemala. He also received the Peter Duffy Award from Liberty and JUSTICE in 2009 for his work at Public Interest Lawyers.

Dr Mark Coté

Mark is a Lecturer in Digital Culture and Society, leading development there in the analysis of big social data via an AHRC-funded research project. He is a member of both the Department of Digital Humanities and the Department of Culture, Media and Creative Industries.

Mark pursued both his Master's and PhD in the School of Communication at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver. There he was steeped in media theory, critical theory and cultural studies.His dissertation, 'The Italian Foucault' explored the Italian post-operaismo/ autonomist movement and Foucault circa 1973-78 as a means for developing new conceptual approaches to networked new media.He continued that trajectory in his sustained analysis of social media, developing 'immaterial labour 2.0' to conceptually frame the increasingly frictionless conflation of social and economic relations therein. This widely cited work has subsequently been revised, republished and translated into German.This technologically-enmeshed immateriality—namely social, communicative and affective capacities—raise basic questions about our relation to technology. These have been examined via the prosthetic paradigm of media theory, and originary technicity as proposed by Leroi-Gourhan and developed by Stiegler.

Nick Dearden

Nick Dearden is the director of the World Development Movement which campaigns in the UK on global justice issues. He was previously the director of Jubilee Debt Campaign. Nick started his career at War on Want where he became a senior campaigner. He went on to be corporates campaign manager at Amnesty International UK. As director of the Jubilee Debt Campaign, he built strong relationships with campaigners in the global south. He helped win a new law to stop Vulture Funds from using UK courts to squeeze huge debt payments out of poor countries.

Cory Doctorow

Cory Doctorow is an activist, writer, blogger, public speaker, and a technology person. He evangelises on behalf of the EFF, works on policy research, participates in standards bodies, and works to enlist the support of other organizations in EFF's issues.

In a previous life, he was a software entrepreneur, co-founding a company called OpenCola. He is an award-winning science fiction writer, as well as co-editor of the popular weblog Boing Boing and frequent contributor to Wired Magazine and the O'Reilly Network

Prof Lilian Edwards

Lilian is a leading academic in the field of Internet law. She has taught information technology law, e-commerce law, and Internet law at undergraduate and postgraduate level since 1996 and been involved with law and artificial intelligence since 1985.

Her current research interests, while broad, revolve around the topics of online privacy, intermediary liability, cybercrime, Internet pornography, digital assets and digital copyright enforcement.

Cathy Gellis

Cathy Gellis is a technology lawyer in the San Francisco Bay Area with a practice focused on intellectual property, intermediary liability, free speech, privacy, and other issues affecting information technology use and development.

She is also the founder of DigitalAgeDefense.org, a project focused on the convergence of law and technology. She regularly writes, speaks, counsels, and litigates on these and other legal and technology topics.

In a previous life she was an aspiring journalist-turned-Internet professional who developed and managed websites for companies in Silicon Valley and Europe. 

B.A. University of California at Berkeley in Mass Communications and Sociology; J.D. Boston University.

Jennifer Gibson

Jennifer has testified about her work before both the US Congress and British Parliamentarians. In 2012, she led a delegation of Pakistani drone victims to the US, where for the first time US Congressmen and women heard testimony from those directly affected by drones.

In the UK, Jennifer works closely with the All Party Parliamentary Group on Drones to affect UK policy on armed drones. She also serves as a commissioner on the University of Birmingham’s Policy Commission on the Security Impacts of Drones, chaired by Sir David Ormand. The Commission is expected to publish its findings in Autumn 2014.

Prior to joining Reprieve, Jennifer was at Stanford University, where she co-authored, Living Under Drones - one of the most comprehensive accounts of the impact of drones in Pakistan to date. Jennifer also has extensive experience in children’s rights, rule of law and development in sub-Saharan Africa. She has worked on human rights litigation in both domestic and international courts, including at the Special Court for Sierra Leone in The Hague, where she worked on the trial of Former Liberian President Charles Taylor.

Jennifer holds a Juris Doctor from Stanford Law School, and a MPhil in International Relations from the University of Cambridge, where she held a Gates Cambridge Scholarship.

Contact: jennifer.gibson@reprieve.org.uk  or on Twitter @jennifermgibson

Jodie Ginsberg

Jodie is Chief Executive of Index on Censorship from the think-tank, Demos.

A former London Bureau Chief for Reuters, Jodie worked for more than a decade as a foreign correspondent and business journalist.

She was previously Head of Communications for Camfed, a non-profit organisation working in girls’ education.

Contact jodie@indexoncensorship.org

 Julian Huppert

Julian Huppert is the Member of Parliament for Cambridge. He was elected with a majority of nearly 7,000 in May 2010. Julian has always been passionate about human rights and civil liberties, which led him into politics. 

Julian is currently a member of the Home Affairs Select Committee and has been involved in a wide range of inquiries, including those into policing, phone hacking and counter-terrorism. He is also co-chair of the Liberal Democrat Parliamentary Party Home Affairs, Justice and Equalities Committee and has spoken out on numerous occasions about the need for more robust oversight of the intelligence services. In March this year, Julian authored a Digital Bill of Rights policy motion, with Tim Farron MP, which has been successfully adopted as Liberal Democrat party policy.

Nani Jansen

Eric King

Eric is the Deputy Director at Privacy International.

He has been with Privacy International since 2010 creating the Big Brother Incorporated Project, an investigation into the international trade of surveillance technology.

More recently he helped launch Eyes Wide Open, a campaign to bring the intelligence agencies of the Five Eyes under the rule of law. He has previously worked at Reprieve, is on the advisory council of the Foundation for Information Policy Research and holds a degree in law from the London School of Economics where he also occasionally teaches

Simon McGarr

Simon is a solicitor and graduate of UCD and GMIT. Prior to entering the legal profession he worked in the public sector. Simon concentrates on Civil and Commercial litigation matters. He has particular experience in the areas of IP and internet law and is regularly called on to comment in the media.

Simon is also lawyer for Digital Rights Ireland, a small campaign group of volunteers, successfully won a ruling at the European Court of Justice, which declared that the Data Retention Directive was invalid. This had a major impact on the legal basis for data retention.

Glyn Moody

Glyn Moody is a journalist, blogger and speaker. He writes about digital rights, copyright and patents on Techdirt, while his blog about open source, open access and open data is at http://opendotdotdot.blogspot.com. He started writing and lecturing about business use of the Internet in early 1994, and about open source in 1995. In 1997 he wrote the first mainstream feature about GNU/Linux and free software, which appeared in Wired magazine. His book, “Rebel Code: Linux and the Open Source Revolution” - the only detailed history of free software written so far - was published in 2001. “Digital Code of Life: How Bioinformatics is Revolutionising Science, Medicine and Business” appeared in 2004, and explores the rise and importance of digital genomics. He can be followed @glynmoody on Twitter and identi.ca, and +glynmoody on Google+.

Claude Moraes MEP

Claude Moraes is Labour Member of the European Parliament for London and Chair of the European Parliament's Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs Committee (LIBE). Claude was responsible for the European Parliament's Inquiry and report into the Electronic Mass Surveillance of EU citizens following the start of the Snowden revelations last year. MEPs in the European Parliament backed the report which called for an end to blanket mass surveillance by both the US and EU Member States. The report outlined an action plan for a European Digital Habeas Corpus which includes the immediate adoption of new rules on data protection and the need to negotiate with the US to ensure stronger safeguards for EU citizens including on judicial redress.

First elected to the European Parliament in 1999, Claude was the first Asian origin MEP. He was re-elected in 2009 where he led the London list. In July 2014 Claude was elected Chairman of the European Parliament's Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs Committee, the first ethnic minority MEP to be elected into this role.

Rachel Oldroyd

Rachel is the managing editor of the Bureau of Investigative Journalism. She joined the Bureau as deputy editor shortly after its launch in 2010 and has led many of the organisation's key projects.

Before joining the Bureau she spent 13 years at the Mail on Sunday, where she launched the award-winning Reportage section in Live magazine. The section focused heavily on human rights violations and, under her editorship, won more than a dozen media awards.

She started her career as a financial reporter working in the trade press. She became the Bureau's managing editor in October 2014.

Contact racheloldroyd@tbij.com or on twitter @Raoldroyd

Eleanor Saitta

Eleanor Saitta is a hacker, designer, artist, writer, and barbarian.  She makes a living and a vocation of understanding how complex, transdisciplinary systems operate and redesigning them to work, or at least fail, better.  Among other things, Eleanor is a co-founder of the Trike project, Technical Director at the International Modern Media Institute, a member of the advisory boards at the Freedom of the Press Foundation and Geeks Without Bounds, a contributor to the Briar project, and freelance security architecture and strategy consultant.  She is nomadic and lives mostly in airports and occasionally in New York, London, and Stockholm.  She can be found at http://dymaxion.org and on Twitter as @dymaxion.

Erin Saltman

Dr Erin Marie Saltman is a Senior Researcher at the Quilliam Foundation. She holds a BA in International Relations from Columbia University and a double International MA in Economy, State and Society from University College London and Corvinus University in Budapest. Erin completed her PhD at University College London, analysing political socialisation processes and civil activism in new democracies, using Hungary as a case study. A large focus of Erin’s doctoral thesis was on the process of radicalisation among youth activists.

As Senior Researcher, Erin continues to work on investigating processes of radicalisation, analysing both Islamist extremist and radical right trends, addressing ways of countering extremism. Most recently Erin co-authored Quilliam’s report about online extremism and how to counter it.

Güneş Tavmen

Güneş has been working on the intersection of technology and society in a variety of contexts for about a decade.

After working for an NGO in Istanbul for several years, she went back to the academia and now doing her PhD at Birkbeck, University of London.

She has recently written a report on surveillance and censorship on the internet in Turkey for Association for Progressive Communications and Hivos.

Jillian C York

Jillian is EFF's Director for International Freedom of Expression.

Although she specializes in freedom of expression issues in the Arab world, her work encompasses a broad range of topics, from digital security to the privatization of censorship.

With Ramzi Jaber, Jillian co-founded OnlineCensorship.org, a winner of the 2014 Knight News Challenge.  She is a frequent public speaker on topics including surveillance, censorship, and the role of social media in social change. Her writing has been published by the New York Times, Al Jazeera, the Atlantic, the Guardian, Slate, Foreign Policy, and Die Zeit, among others.

Jillian is a fellow at the Center for Internet &Human Rights at the European University Viadrinaand serves on the Board of Directors of Global Voices Online, and on the Advisory Boards of R-Shief and Radio Free Asia’s Open Technology Fund.