The 703 Locksport Crew is composed of a variety of people with expertise ranging from locksport enthusiast, to ex hardware store employee, to an actual bona fide amateur locksmith (whatever that means).
Aerodynamika is an artist, software developer and researcher working in the sphere of creative coding, sound and text visualization. https://deemeetree.com
aestetix likes privacy, but really hates the web of trust. He also occasionally causes trouble for governments by holding them accountable.
Flavio Aggio is the chief information security officer at the World Health Organization (WHO). Additionally, he represents WHO in key forums focused on information security and cybersecurity. Prior to joining WHO, Flavio was the chief technology officer at the city and county of San Francisco, where he developed technology solutions to modernize and protect the city. Before that, he held technical leadership positions in enterprise architecture, project management, telecommunications, and IT operations with Unisys, ASML, Dow Chemical, and Rohm and Haas. In 2014, he enabled the interconnection of the San Francisco and San Jose Wi-Fi networks. He holds a Bachelor of Science in physics from Sao Paulo University in Brazil and an executive MBA from Temple University in the United States.
Alice Aguilar is executive director of the Progressive Technology Project. For over 30 years, Alices lifes work has focused on supporting indigenous peoples rights, environmental justice, and reproductive justice issues. Alices current work involves leading the fight against racism and sexism in technology; bringing women, queer and trans people of color into movement technology; and winning respect for the people of color already doing technology work within social justice movements.
Marc Alessi is a serial tech entrepreneur and attorney who happened to be a New York State legislator when Wardenclyffe was in danger of being demolished. He helped secure $850,000 in grants to save Teslas only remaining laboratory, and the challenge to raise matching funds became the impetus for launching TSCWs record-breaking crowdfund. He currently serves as executive director of Tesla Science Center at Wardenclyffe. He is founder and COO of SynchroPET, a biomedical device startup. He is also an angel investor and executive director of the Business Incubator Association of New York State.
Mitch Altman is a hacker and inventor, known for inventing TV-B-Gone, a keychain that turns off TVs in public places. He co-founded a successful Silicon Valley startup and did pioneering work in virtual reality. He is an author and teacher, and goes around the world giving talks and workshops. Mitch promotes hackerspaces, open source hardware, and mentors others wherever he goes. He is a co-founder of Noisebridge hackerspace in San Francisco, and is president and CEO of Cornfield Electronics.
Amelia Andersdotter (@teirdes) works at CENTR, a trade organization for the Council of European ccTLD registries. She also works on data protection in Sweden with DataSkydd. She was a member of the European Parliament until 2014 and promoted copyright reform, competition, and interplay between technical and legal standards.
Dr. Gillian Gus Andrews is not the titular honeypot. The honeypot is her email account. Guss background spans hacking, education, and software usability. Her latest project, Keep Calm and Log On,is a handbook to help everyday people survive the digital revolution without getting trampled, and is available from MIT Press. Over the past five years, Gus has worked to improve everyday users understanding of digital security through her work at the Open Internet Tools Project, Simply Secure, and ThoughtWorks. She has served as a user experience specialist at ThoughtWorks and at Linden Lab (home of Second Life). Her work on open-source encryption tools has informed policy at the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the U.S. State Department. She is the creator of The Media Show,a YouTube series aimed at teaching digital and media literacy skills using snarky puppets. As a former panelist on the hacker radio show Off The Hook and organizer for the Hackers On Planet Earth conference, she has been engaged with digital rights and privacy issues for close to two decades.
Mehwish Ansari (@mehwishaansari) is a delegate for the U.K. to the ITU-T, ITU-D, and ITU Council. Previously, Mehwish worked on digital rights issues at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), as part of the Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project. She holds an MSc in global governance and diplomacy from the University of Oxford.
Sarah Aoun is the chief technologist at the Open Technology Fund. As a human rights technologist, she works with activists, journalists, and high-risk communities on security and privacy. She has given numerous trainings on operational and digital security, and has worked with several groups and NGOs to set up organizational security practices. Sarah currently sits on the board of the Internet Freedom Festival. She was also a Ford-Mozilla open web fellow, an Internet freedom fellow, and an advisor to GJS Security and to the Human Rights Foundation.
Joel Austin is a spatial practitioner and researcher from London. His independent projects explore experimental modes of practice that prioritize socio-technological agendas and have been selected for exhibition at Manifesta Biennale and Thessaloniki Design Week. His project Agriact tackles the emerging market of temporal agricultural labor in southern Europe and was published internationally. In 2020, he will join the architecture department at MIT as an SMarchS research candidate.
Florin Badita is an activist and founder of the civic platform Corruption Kills, founded after a fire in a nightclub killed 64 people because of corruption. The biggest protests that the platform has facilitated resulted in more than half a million people in the street. Florin is now working on the European Activism Conference together with Friday For Future, a gathering of 5000 like-minded activists, searching for partners, speakers, and volunteers.
Bruce Barnett (@grymoire) is a security consultant, research scientist, maker, and magician with 45 years experience. He has presented at DEF CON and runs the Hardware Hacking Village for ANYCon.
Ed Beamz is the co-founder of r00tf0lds and spends his time building things that spark, and are shiny, bright, and usually secure.
Charles Beckwith (@FashionTechGuru), is festival director for Cyberpunk Now and one of the founders of Carolinacon. He is a media producer with over 20 years of experience across film, television, radio, theater, magazines, and podcasts. His writing on technology has appeared in 2600 Magazine, Business of Fashion, Payments and Cards Magazine,and other publications. Charles is the creator and host of American Fashion Podcast, a show about how the fashion industry works under the hood, which recently celebrated the release of its 250th episode. He is CEO at Greyland Fireworks Corporation and several of its subsidiaries.
Bellum is the co-founder of r00tf0lds. He didnt sell out, he bought in. The difference is important, but only to sellouts.
Austin Bennett develops data processing systems at DISH Network and consults through Bamboozoology, LLC. He is a committer on the Apache Beam project.
Thomas Bermudez (@BermudezBThomas) has studied international relations during undergraduate and postgraduate degrees at Cardiff University prior to University College London (UCL). Additionally, he has experience volunteering with the Nightline Association. His main interests are understanding the complexity of violence production and the challenge of helping those who have experienced it.
Emma Best (@NatSecGeek) is an independent journalist and transparency activist who has filed thousands of Freedom of Information Act requests with government agencies. Known for their tenacity and keen eye for the details in documents, they are a ruthless advocate for the truth at any cost. They co-founded the Distributed Denial of Secrets collective and coordinate its operations.
BiaSciLab (@BiaSciLab @GirlsWhoHack @SecureOpenVote) is a 13-year-old hacker and maker, as well as an international speaker. She received national attention when she hacked the voting reporting system at Defcon 26. This work was recently highlighted at the U.S. congressional hearing on election security. She is the founder and CEO of Girls Who Hack, an organization focused on teaching girls the skills of hacking so that they can change the future. She has also started Secure Open Vote and is building an end to end election system. BiaSciLab enjoys inventing things, giving talks, and teaching classes on making, programming, and hacking.
Elizabeth Biddlecome is a consultant and instructor, delivering technical training and mentorship to students and professionals. She is a senior instructor for infosec and leverages her enthusiasm for architecture, security, and code to design and implement comprehensive information security solutions for business needs. Elizabeth enjoys wielding everything from soldering irons to scripting languages in cybersecurity competitions, hackathons, and CTFs.
Idalin Bobé is the founder of TechActivist.Org, a grassroots organization providing free technical training and political education workshops to working class youth, activists, and disruptors interested in using technology for social good. She is also a founding member of the Popular Education Project, serves on the national education committee of the Poor Peoples Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival, and is part of the Peoples Forum, a movement incubator in New York City. Coming from a poor Afro-Latinx community in North Philadelphia, Idalin witnessed firsthand how the people most impacted by social ills were and still are on the losing side of the digital, educational, and economic divide. That understanding led her to dedicate herself to work directly with organizations that are focused on social change and are part of the communities they serve. Through her tech literacy programs, Idalin provides hands-on workshops introducing communities to digital media tools, digital security, open source, web development, and emerging technology like 3D printing.
Rainer Bock is executive producer of Hacker:Hunter and worked in cybersecurity PR for more than ten years before he was given the opportunity to change slightly and start producing documentaries.
Sam Bowne has been teaching computer networking and security classes at City College San Francisco since 2000, and is the founder of Infosec Decoded, Inc.
Bill Budington is a long-time activist, cryptography enthusiast, and a senior staff technologist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. His research has been featured in the The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Guardian, and has been cited by the U.S. Congress. He is the lead developer of Panopticlick, led HTTPS Everywhere from 2015 to 2018, and has contributed to projects like Lets Encrypt and SecureDrop. He loves hackerspaces and getting together with other techies to tinker, code, share, and build the technological commons.
Twila Busby has more than 20 years experience in education. She is an advocate for and trains others in project-based learning. Her Shenzhen school has its own makerspace. Twila promotes the idea that every classroom should be a makerspace, where academics support creativity and students bring their ideas into the physical world.
Dan Calacci is a PhD student and artist at the MIT Media Lab studying how data and algorithms impact community behavior and governance. They are also a co-founder and scientific advisor of Riff Analytics, which works to build AI-powered tools that help people learn how to collaborate more effectively and be more emotionally intelligent. Their recent research involves studying how new sources of data and methods of data governance can help communities and worker collectives advocate for a more just future. Their artwork and research have been exhibited and presented around the globe.
Roni Carta (Lupin) started programming at ten years old and then jumped to hacking at 13. Like everyone else, he was a script kiddie but wanted to quickly understand the whys and the hows. At 16, he hacked his high school for a project and got root in the main servers, and then finished in second place in the CSAW Red Team 2019 competition in Europe. Roni is now working on becoming a pentester.
Casandrois a German engineer in information technology. He is a member of the Chaos Computer Club (CCC) and interested in older technology, both from its technological as well as its social side. His article on Bildschirmtext as a potential alternative to web services made the front page of Die Datenschleuder (ds.ccc.de/pdfs/ds101.pdf). His first contact with the teletext family of standards came when his parents got their first teletext-capable TV set. This opened another window into the world, particularly as Austrian television soon carried a teletext course on teletext. In recent years, he has been fixing BTX decoders, has restored pages from tapes, and set up BTX dialup numbers.
Lena Chen (@elleperil)is an artist, organizer, and sex worker whose research examines labor, intimacy, and trauma. In 2018, she founded the expressive arts initiative Heal Her (www.healherproject.com), which has worked with artists, therapists, and survivors of sexual violence to convene trauma-informed storytelling circles in seven countries. She has been an invited speaker at Oxford, Yale, Stanford, Columbia, SXSW, and re:publica; featured in international media (including The New York Times,CNN, The Independent, and VICE); and funded by the Puffin Foundation and the Burning Man Global Arts Fund. She received a B.A. in sociology from Harvard University, and is currently pursuing her MFA at the Carnegie Mellon Universitys School of Art.
Madiha Choksi is the research and learning technologies librarian at Columbia University Libraries where she works closely with faculty across the humanities and social sciences to integrate computational research methods into their teaching and coursework. Her own research investigates the deep layers of sociopolitical implications of data-driven emerging technologies. Specifically, she focuses on the legal implications of changing expectations of privacy in an increasingly connected world. Madiha is a strong advocate of the open source community, and prioritizes access and use of free and open source tools and resources in her professional research and teaching capacity at Columbia University. She holds an MS from the University of Toronto and an MA from Columbia University.
cld is a visual artist.
Cindy Cohn is an American civil liberties attorney specializing in Internet law. After serving for 15 years as legal director and general counsel for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, she became its executive director in 2015. In 2006, she was named one of the 100 most influential lawyers in America by the National Law Journal.In November 2018, she was featured among Americas Top 50 Women In Tech by Forbes. She also serves on the board of directors of the Tor Project, Inc.
Andrew Crocker is a senior staff attorney on the Electronic Frontier Foundations civil liberties team. He focuses on EFFs national security and privacy docket, as well as the Coders Rights Project. While in law school, Andrew worked at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, the American Civil Liberties Unions Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project, and the Center for Democracy and Technology.
Dylan Cruz is a 17-year-old phone phreak from Winter Springs, Florida who has been interested in the telephone for a very long time. He has a particular interest in the U.S. phone network of the 1970s and 1980s, a time he never experienced, yet feels nostalgic for. In early 2018, along with a few friends, he started the NPSTN phone network (npstn.us) for telephone phreaks, collectors, professionals, and hobbyists. From that point he has learned a great deal about the phone network and even started his own company: The Mountain Pacific Telephone Company, registered in the state of Montana. A phone phreak since he was 12, Dylan plans on becoming a registered CLEC.
Joe Cupano is thankful for what he calls an accidental career in technology that started with component level repair of early microcomputers (as in solder iron) to turning technology tricks in three-piece suits for globally recognized companies. His first fusion of his amateur radio and computer interests was around 1983 when he successfully sent an auto-run computer program acoustically via VHF radio from one Sinclair ZX81 to another messing with a thermal printer. Joe has served roles in the amateur radio community that include the ARRL HSMM Working Group, which helped spawned the mesh networking popularity of today.
The Cypurr Collective is a group of cybersecurity fans who love to put on accessible and holistic workshops around privacy and security. Started in 2016, they host regular cryptoparties, social events, and discussions, with the purpose of helping folks learn how to protect their privacy and security online, in the face of peer, corporate, and state actors, focusing on a harm reduction approach to personal safety. Theyve held digital security workshops at venues such as New York Public Library, Brooklyn Public Library, Bluestockings, Babycastles, and the Silent Barn, and they are a member of the Electronic Frontier Alliance. Their work can be viewed at cypurr.nyc.
Michael Data (@the_archivist314) is an organizer of Cyberpunk Now, and an entrepreneur, artist, and cyberpunk enthusiast. A former radio personality with Eyes Wide Open Radio, hes worked as a news analyst, as well as a staff photographer for Edible Bronx. Winner of the CUNY startup competition 2019, he is currently CEO of Odd Job Technology, Inc. In his spare time, Michael documents the real world through photography and brings imaginary ones to life through online pen-and-paper gaming.
Eric (XlogicX) Davisson (@XlogicX) hacks at anything low level. Hes unmasked sanitized IP addresses in packets (because checksums) and crafts his own pcaps with just xxd. He feeds complete garbage to forensic tools, AV products, decompression software, and intrusion detection systems. He likes to craft his own length/distance pairs to compress his own Deflate data. He made evil strings more evil (with automation) to exploit high consumption regular expressions. Lately he has been declaring war on assembly language (calling it too high-level) and doing all kinds of ignorant things with machine code. He will beat your high score on nearly any boot sector game, in some way or another...
Molly de Blanc is a digital rights activist who draws on her experience of using technology while bipolar. She works for the GNOME Foundation.
Moacir P. de S Pereira is the research data librarian at Columbia University Libraries. He helps researchers improve their use of data in their scholarly projects, including visualizing their data. Additionally, he is a scholar of literature and geography, where he uses spatial data to generate new literary research questions. Specifically, he focuses on American novels of the 20th and 21st centuries, tracking migration and geographical imagination. He has taught at New York University and the University of Chicago.
Dim Sum Labs (DSL) was founded in 2011. DSL is Hong Kongs first and only hackerspace. DSL is open to anyone interested in hacking: the intellectual challenge to creatively overcome, circumvent, deconstruct, or otherwise hack the limitations, capabilities, purposes, forms, etc. of virtually anything - or, in other words, to mess around with [anything] for fun.
dj-spock was influenced by the Sound of Frankfurt in the early 1990s. Since 2001, he has played an active part in organizing hacker conferences and parties in Germany, the Netherlands and Poland. He also hosts a monthly hacker radio show and is an active member of Chaos Computer Club. He plays at hacker events, clubs, parties, radio shows, and also big international festivals like the Garbicz Festival in Poland or the Irma & Paul festival in Davos, Switzerland.
The Doctor is a security practitioner and systems engineer working somewhere on the west coast. When not reading hex dumps, writing agents and bots, or spending time with his family, he spends too much time and money restoring and tinkering with classic 8-bit computers. He occasionally blogs about what hes working on (and sometimes how it nearly blew up in his face). Many of his programming projects recently have been to help people assess the risk of COVID-19 and determine what safety measures to take. A nontrivial fraction of his exocortex is interfaced with the Fediverse.
Cory Doctorow is a Canadian-British blogger, journalist, and science fiction author who served as co-editor of the blog Boing Boing.He is an activist in favor of liberalizing copyright laws and a proponent of the Creative Commons organization, using some of their licenses for his books. Some common themes of his work include digital rights management, file sharing, and post-scarcity economics. His most recent novel is Walkaway(2017) and his most recent collection of novellas is Radicalized (2019).
Mickael E. is a security engineer at Freedom of the Press Foundation and the lead developer of SecureDrop.
Edible Makerspace (EMS) is a Singapore-based multicultural group that explores the viability of thinking critically through food prototypes within the food/agricultural system in the Southeast Asian context. They target local and regional grassroots communities engaged in agricultural and food livelihoods, but also cater to curious individuals keen to explore alternative ideas via food as a medium. At the heart of the makerspace lies tinkering: making machines to explore the range of flavors, studying the environment, and deconstructing food sources. It has a strong emphasis on the DIY biohacker approach to food futures.
Electric Sheep is a collaborative abstract artwork founded by Scott Draves. The thousands of computers it runs on work together as a supercomputer to render the animations (each frame takes about an hour). Everyone watching can influence what everyone sees by voting, and the more popular sheep mate with each other and reproduce according to a genetic algorithm, hence the flock evolves to satisfy human desire. You can also design your own sheep and upload them into the gene pool. You can buy high-quality limited edition artworks made with the Electric Sheep, as well as Blu-Rays, DVDs and T-shirts, from ScottDraves.com. Proceeds from these sales keep the network free to the public. Programmed by an Open Source team from all over the world.
Elliot is a motion artist and creative coder who works in interactive, fabrication, and large scale immersive experiences. Elliot blends visual work with an interest in mutual aid, security, and privacy online. Based in Brooklyn.
Maddalena Esposito has a background that spans from linguistics to technology and human rights. After completing her MA, Maddalena went on to volunteer as a policy researcher for Big Brother Watch, focusing on online harms. However, Maddalenas research interests are broader - she is currently looking at abuse, labor and exploitation in technology.
Christopher M. Flatley has a masters degree in cybersecurity and is currently a full-time instructor at SUNY Rockland for the cybersecurity department where he also coaches a competitive hacking team. He has been a visiting professor at Shanghai Jian Qiao University. He is a partner in a cybersecurity firm which specializes in vulnerability and risk assessments for financial institutions and other organizations in regulated industries. In this role, he oversees offensive operations with a specialization in physical entry, wireless exploitation, and network infiltration.
Jonathan Foote is a recovering scientist, lapsed musician, and electrical engineer from San Francisco. Understanding the principles of analog synthesis helped him study for his PhD in signal analysis. One of his qualifications for running his workshop at HOPE is that he has played analog synthesizers in front of paying audiences.
Zack Freedman is a freelance prototype developer in New York City, building electronics under the name Voidstar Lab. Zack specializes in wearable technology and produces hardware hacking videos for YouTube.
Joshua Fried is a HOPE concert veteran, involved with RADIO WONDERLAND, which turns mass media into recombinant funk, processing live FM radio with a Buick steering wheel, four old shoes hit with sticks, knobs, buttons and custom code.
Corbin Frisvold (@QuesoSec) is a 16-year-old hacker and polymath, involved in many fields such as mathematics, physics, computer science, and electrical engineering. He attended his first infosec conference (BSidesDE) at six years old and hasnt looked back. Since then he has worked on many significant projects, including publishing research papers on evolutionary soft robotics, running a village for kids called SpawnCamp, and running a blog at maker.godshell.com. Currently he is working on projects involving machine learning and its applications to robotics.
Jason Garbis has worked in the software industry for over 30 years, in roles that include software engineer, technical consultant, and product manager. This makes him quite old! In addition to his current professional role leading product management for a zero trust network security vendor, he embraces being a lifelong learner and isnt embarrassed to be a beginner at new things, even at his advanced age. He is a published author, and holds a CISSP certification.
Robert W. Gehl is an award-winning author, professor, and a Fulbright fellow. He is currently the F. Jay Taylor endowed chair of communication at Louisiana Tech.
Marjorie George is an educator who has retired from the New York City school system and loves to explore the globe. She and Phillip Scroggins have been traveling the world together (mostly during summer vacations) for over 20 years and, between them, have visited every continent on Earth, over 90 percent of that travel having been done using airline miles.
Alex Gil is the digital scholarship librarian at Columbia University Libraries. He collaborates with faculty, students, and library professionals leveraging computational and network technologies in humanities research, pedagogy, and knowledge production. He is among the founders of several ongoing, warmly received initiatives where he currently plays leadership roles: co-director of the Studio@Butler at Columbia University, a tech-light library innovation space focused on digital scholarship and pedagogy; co-founder and moderator of Columbias Group for Experimental Methods in the Humanities, a vibrant trans-disciplinary research cluster focused on experimental humanities; senior editor of sx archipelagos, a journal of Caribbean Digital Studies, and co-wrangler of The Caribbean Digital conference series.
Naomi Gilens, EFFs Frank Stanton fellow, is an attorney specializing in free speech litigation. Prior to joining EFF, she worked on issues of free speech, privacy, and government transparency at the ACLU. Naomi graduated from Harvard Law School and Princeton University, and served as a law clerk to the Honorable David J. Barron of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit, and the Honorable Indira Talwani of the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts.
Daniel Kahn Gillmor is a contributor to free software projects including Debian, notmuch, GnuPG, and Enigmail, and a technologist for the ACLUs Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project. He is also a participant in the IETF, where he focuses on security, privacy, and other protocol features that impact civil rights and liberties.
Randy Gingeleski is an application security engineer for WarnerMedia. He tends to bot online games if their makers dont watch closely, and was a consultant in another life.
Cameron Glass was born in New York City in 2002 and graduated from Brooklyn Technical High School this spring. He performed in the 2018 and 2019 Tibet House Benefit concerts at Carnegie Hall with Debbie Harry and Laurie Anderson, among others. Hes been published four times in 2600: The Hacker Quarterly,composed original music in 2016 and 2018 for the HOPE conference, as well as outro music for Off The Hook. Currently, Cameron is composing and performing with his experimental band, Worlds of If, and is looking forward to starting NYU in the fall.
Joe Gray joined the U.S. Navy directly out of high school and served for seven years as a submarine navigation electronics technician. He is currently a senior OSINT specialist at Qomplx, Inc. and previously maintained his own blog and podcast called Advanced Persistent Security. Joe has contributed material for the likes of Tripwire, AlienVault, ITSPmagazine, CSO Online, Forbes,and Dark Reading, as well as his own platforms. He is the author of a few OSINT tools, such as WikiLeaker and the forthcoming tools Decepticon and Intercepticon.
Bill Graydon is a principal researcher at GGR Security where he hacks everything from locks and alarms to critical infrastructure. This has given him some very fine-tuned skills for breaking stuff. Hes passionate about advancing the security field through research, teaching numerous courses, giving talks, and running DEF CONs Lock Bypass Village. Hes received various degrees in computer engineering, security, and forensics and comes from a broad background of work experience in physical and cyber security, software development, anti-money laundering, and infectious disease detection.
Johannes Grenzfurthner is an artist and a filmmaker, writer, performer, and researcher. Boing Boingreferred to him as leitnerd, a wordplay that ironically hints at his role in nerd, hacker, and art culture. Hes the founder and artistic director of monochrom, an art and theory group that acts internationally, and the editor-in-chief of the art/tech/activism magazine The Free Lunch.After directing feature length documentaries Traceroute(2016) and Glossary of Broken Dreams(2018), Johannes continues working on feature film projects such as Masking Thresholdand Je Suis Auto. Hes head of the Arse Elektronika sex and tech festival and the Hedonistika food-tech festival, and hes the host of Roboexotica, the festival for cocktail robotics.
Dana Gretton is a maker, programmer, artist, and informal learning enthusiast. He has some radical ideas about what education can be and what it is not. He is a graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in electrical engineering and computer science, and a current graduate student at the MIT Media Lab. His current work is in robotic biological process automation and cryptographic systems to make DNA synthesis safer.
Dr. Matthew Guariglia is a policy analyst working on issues of surveillance and privacy at the local, state, and federal level at EFF. Matthew received a PhD in history at the University of Connecticut where his research focused on the intersection of race, immigration, U.S. imperialism, and policing in New York City. He is a frequent contributor to the Freedom of Information-centered outlet Muckrock, and he is a visiting scholar in the Department of History at UC Berkeley.
Juliana Guerra studied sociology and explores the intersection between body, technology, and social movements. She has worked at Derechos Digitales since 2016 where she is responsible for coordinating and implementing advocacy and communication strategies, with emphasis on technical issues. In recent years, her work has focused on feminist digital security and infrastructures.
Christopher Guess has been the lead technologist at the Duke University Reporters Lab for the past five years where he helps lead a team dedicated to automating fact checking and making fact checking more accessible to the audience via policy, technology, and reporting. Previously, Christopher worked on organized crime and money laundering in Eastern Europe with the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project as a technologist for two years based in Sarajevo. In addition, he has been a working reporter in the U.S. and abroad, as well as founding multiple tech startups in his current base of operations in New York City.
Jasmin Hagendorfer is a Vienna-based contemporary artist, writer, curator, and festival organizer. Her main artistic interest is in installation, sculpture, and performance. As an artist and lecturer, she is concerned with social and political discourses and questions about gender identity. She is one of the founders and creative director of the Porn Film Festival Vienna. Since 2019, she is the creative director of Transition International Queer and Minorities Film Festival.
Phillip Hallam-Baker is a member of the CERN team that designed the World Wide Web, He has made seminal contributions to the design of HTTP, SAML and web services security. As principal scientist of VeriSign and Comodo, he was a formative influence on the deployment of X.509v3 to form the WebPKI. Along the way, he once deployed an email server in the Executive Office of the President for use by the Clinton administration.
Alexis Hancock is a staff technologist who helps to secure the web by working on HTTPS Everywhere. She has previously been a web developer and system administrator for seven years, and a statistician in the education realm. She has earned degrees from the Rochester Institute of Technology in media arts and technology and The New School in organizational change management. She is very passionate about encryption and tech equity for all, and has been assisting activists and educators with their tech needs for almost ten years.
HangOnGetReady is a Buffalo-based composer and performer specializing in FamiTracker. He develops games as a member of indie studio Neon Deity Games and has composed for several other studios as well. His weapon of choice is the keytar, which he has sworn to use only for good.
Russell Hanson is a well-known biohacker and scientist pushing the envelope in neuroscience, AI, and biosensors and applications. His work in neurohacking and applications of AI to neuroimaging has been published in Natureand other specialty journals. After training in Boston at the Boston Childrens Hospital and Harvard Medical School, he joined the faculty at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City. He serves as a founding partner or advisor to several biotech companies including Ligandal, Aptavid, and Brain Backups. His work has been featured in Wired,the Chaos Computer Club, and Vice. In his spare time, he likes to go paragliding.
Abi Hassen is an attorney, technologist, and co-founder of the Black Movement-Law Project (BMLP), a legal support rapid response group that grew out of the uprisings in Ferguson, Baltimore, and elsewhere. He is currently a partner at ONeill and Hassen LLP, a law practice focused on indigent criminal defense. Prior to his current work, he was the mass defense coordinator at the National Lawyers Guild. Abi has also worked as a political campaign manager and strategist, union organizer, and community organizer. Abi conducts training, speaks, and writes on topics of race, technology, (in)justice, and the law.
Myaisha Hayes is the campaign strategies director at MediaJustice. She previously spent two years as the organizations national organizer on criminal justice and technology, where she oversaw the launch of the #NoDigitalPrisons and #ProtectBlackDissent campaigns. Myaisha also brings several years of organizing experience with her from various national and local campaigns including President Obamas reelection campaign, Fight for $15, and the CLOSErikers campaign.
David Hétu leads the scientific research operations as chief research officer at Flare Systems. A PhD in criminology from the Universit de Montral, he focuses his research on illicit markets on the Internet and the darknet. His findings, published in over 40 articles over the last ten years, have provided insights into the structure and inner workings of the criminal underground.
Hispagatos Collective is an anarchist hacker collective that has been around for about ten years with this name, and as binaryfreedom since 2003, helping organizations like Free Software Foundation and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, while also attending 2600-related events and promoting the original hacker ethics ideas of Steven Levy and the anarchist decentralized roots of the hacker movement.
Harlo Holmes is the director of digital security at Freedom of the Press Foundation. She strives to help individual journalists in various media organizations become confident and effective in securing their communications within their newsrooms, with their sources, and with the public at large. She is a media scholar, software programmer, and activist; and is an adjunct professor at New York University.
Cedric Honnet is a research engineer with a background in embedded systems. He explores the connections between interactivity and the arts by traveling the world of research labs and hackerspaces. He worked as a firmware engineer and InterHacktivist, co-founded a couple of companies developing tangible interfaces, and created interactive systems/installations worldwide. He has worked on eTextile music controllers, augmented immersive systems, interactive art pieces, modular implants, 3D positioning systems, and many other open source projects.
John Huntington is a professor of entertainment technology at New York City College of Technology, also known as City Tech, which is part of CUNY (City University of New York). Through his company Zircon Designs, John freelances as an author, entertainment and show control systems consultant, and sound engineer. He is also an award-winning photographer. He studied technical design, production, theatre engineering, and sound at the Yale School of Drama (MFA) and Ithaca College (BFA). He lives in New York City and is a member of Local #1 IATSE. He is also a whitewater and sea kayaker, mountain and road biker, and storm chaser.
Harri Hursti was featured in the HBO documentary Kill Chain: The Cyber War on Americas Elections, which explored the sad state of affairs of how little improvement has occurred during the last 15 years, and how many new exposed surfaces have emerged. Harri has been an official election observer at ground zero from New Hampshire to Georgia, observing the issues firsthand and he co-organizes the Voting Machine Hacking Village at DEF CON.
Lara Maysa Ingram is story producer for Hacker:Hunter and a freelance documentary filmmaker and creative portrait photographer. Her passion for filmmaking stems from the urge to find unbelievable stories and make character-driven documentaries out of them in an attempt to better understand this wild world we live in. Stories around technology and its intersection with society and human psychology have always been a source of fascination for her. She is based between London and Bali to balance the stimulation of the city with a strong dose of nature.
Inverse Phase (@inversephase) composes chiptune video game soundtracks (Treachery in Beatdown City, Super Smash Land, Shuttle Scuttle) and writes recognized tributes to other musicians (Nine Inch Nails, Fall Out Boy, Assemblage 23). But hes also often working at a computer and gaming museum in Maryland, participating in the demoscene, or researching something related to old 8-bit computers. Tell him about your favorite cheese slice or ask him about CTM, a chiptune synthesizer and tracker that hes building from scratch!
Dr. Harry Jackson has over 15 years of federal government experience in information system security. He has considerable experience implementing federal cybersecurity compliance. He has comprehensive and detailed knowledge of information system security project planning, strategies, policies and regulations, systems integration and administration, change management impacts, and security awareness training/support. He is currently an IT consultant specializing in support to the intelligence community (IC) and the Department of Defense (DoD). Dr. Jackson is the former information systems security manager for DHS BioWatch and is a whistleblower regarding fraud, waste, abuse, gross mismanagement, and mishandling of classified information within the BioWatch program.
Javaman is a security company founder and a fundraiser for cDc member and former presidential candidate Beto ORourke. He will outline the role he and others have taken to protect campaigns from being hacked and to coordinate support for underdog candidates nationwide.
Shee Jin has passion in computer security, electronics, the maker community, and the Internet of Things.. He has work experience from Dell, Apple, AirAsia, and Symantec as a consultant. Jin moved on to help the public create makerspaces and ran a few maker-centric events. IoT and low powered connectivity has always been a personal challenge to create affordable and customized devices to track everyday objects and solve daily problem with AI. Jin currently works with Mereka makerspace as their electronic tech expert and has helped run a few community programs during the COVID-19 crisis to assist the front lines, such as RumahKita (a back-end logistic service for COVID-19) and the Mereka Faceshield and PPE program.
Jamie Joyce is the founder and executive director of the Society Library, a non-profit organization that mines arguments, claims, and evidence from various forms of media to create a library database of a given societys ideas. The Society Library dives headfirst into highly polarized, persistent, and high-impact subjects to create new communication strategies to reintegrate the societies fracturing from polarization, narrative warfare, and manipulative partisan marketing.
Karamoon is a British hacker based in Tokyo. His main interests are intertwingularity, deep hypertext, Raspberry Pi, and Amiga games. His life changed dramatically when he picked up a copy of 2600: The Hacker Quarterly in late 2001. In 2016, he was diagnosed with terminal cancer. He lived to hack, now he now hacks to live.
Kralj Karlo is a clarinet player from Yugoslavia. He enjoys painting, visiting hackerspaces, and studying foreign languages.
Tom Keenan taught Canadas first computer security course in 1977 and, since then, has been a systems programmer, computer science professor, expert witness in technology cases, and the author of the best-selling book Technocreep: The Surrender of Privacy and the Capitalization of Intimacy. He has spoken about hacking related topics on five continents. Tom was educated at Columbia University, earning four degrees in philosophy, mathematics, engineering, and education. He is a currently a professor in the School of Architecture, Planning, and Landscape at the University of Calgary, where he teaches courses on smart communities. He is also an adjunct professor of computer science where he teaches courses in computer security and cyberwarfare. He is a fellow of the Canadian Information Processing Society and the Canadian Global Affairs Institute, and board chair of the Information and Communications Technology Council of Canada. He was also one of the folks who attended the early 2600 meetings in Manhattan where people ran to the bank of telephones in the Citicorp Building to try phone hacks they had just learned.
Jason Kelley is a digital strategist at EFF who has assisted in and led various campaigns fighting back against face recognition and surveillance, as well as campaigns promoting privacy. Along with Georgetown Laws Center on Privacy and Technology, Jason helped guide the research and creation of the Who Has Your Face website, including compiling previously gathered public records, submitting new public records requests, and assisting in the design and organization of the quizs presentation.
Josh King is the co-founder of Throneless Tech, a DC-based tech worker cooperative. He has over a decade of experience in software development, software architecture, network engineering, and systems administration for social justice. He develops community-oriented technology and secure communication platforms to enable the work of organizers, activists, and journalists globally.
Kody Kinzie is a security researcher at Varonis, with a background in Wi-Fi security and low-cost hacking tools. He hosts the Cyber Weapons Labshow on Null Bytes YouTube channel, a soon to be released show for Hak5, and the Varonis Security Tools podcast. Aside from Wi-Fi hacking, Kody also teaches about open-source intelligence, Python programming, and Arduino-based hacking tools.
Kliment has been teaching people to not be afraid of surface mount electronics prototyping for several years at various events throughout Europe in workshops titled Surface Mount Electronics Assembly for Terrified Beginners and does electronics design and prototyping for a living.
Mallory Knodel (@malloryknodel) is the CTO for the Center for Democracy and Technology in Washington DC. She advises the Freedom Online Coalition on human rights respecting cybersecurity policy and is the co-chair of the Human Rights and Protocols Considerations research group of the IRTF.
Nicholas Koch is a cybersecurity student at Pensacola State College. He is also the president of Information Security Network, a nonprofit organization dedicated to information security education and training in the Gulf Coast. He has worked for over five years as an operator for a UL listed central station, monitoring burglary and fire alarms.
Dr. Olaf Kolkman has a long experience in Internet technology and policy matters, in particular those related to security and trustworthiness of the Internet. He is a board member of the Global Forum on Expertise in Cyberspace and a commissioner of the Global Commission on the Stability of Cyberspace. He is a senior advisor to, and spokesperson of, the Internet Society. He formulates, reviews and advises on technical and policy positions.
Tom Kranz is a director and cybersecurity consultant who helps organizations to understand and address cybersecurity threats and issues. Toms career started over 30 years ago, armed with a BBC Micro and illicit access to Prestel (and other U.K. systems). After a successful consulting career helping U.K. government departments and private sector clients (including Betfair, Accenture, Sainsburys, Fidelity International, and Toyota), he now advises and supports organizations across Europe on their cybersecurity strategy and challenges. Tom lives with his partner in Italy, where they rehabilitate their collection of rescue dogs and cats, as well as managing their many opinionated ducks.
Oryx/Sarah Kraynick is a self-created hacker that roams the world in search of hacker enlightenment. Currently she is holed up in her off-grid cabin prepping for the zombie apocalypse, or better known as the provincial election. Her day job is hacking systems and advising various clients, in other words, a consultant. She currently is leading the vetting efforts for the Saskatchewan Green Party and designing the partys policies on cyber security and privacy. In her off time, whenever that is, she is a Muay Thai fighter and contributes to open source projects.
Michael Kreil is an award-winning journalist and data scientist. He has been specializing in handling and researching large amounts of data for over two decades. In the last three years, he has scraped about five billion tweets and uses the data to review numerous research papers on social bots.
Stefan Kremser (known as Spacehuhn online) is a computer science student and the creator of the ESP8266 Wi-Fi Deauther. His work in opening low-cost microcontrollers to security research includes projects like the Wi-Fi Duck, a Wi-Fi-connected HID attack tool, and the Arduino PCAP library, which allows low-cost Arduino devices to serve as packet sniffers. His programs have been implemented into Wi-Fi hacking wearables and enabled advanced Wi-Fi attacks like unmasking or capturing nearby Wi-Fi devices. You can join his Discord community here: discord.spacehuhn.tech.
Jaguar Kristeller wears yellow crocs with socks in -40C Alaskan winters. He grew up helping his family build their house and spent more time sculpting robots in the garage than sitting in classes at school. After graduating from MIT with a bachelors degree in mechanical engineering in 2016, he then retired to his handmade house in the back of a 2008 Chevy Express box truck. Hes now a Chinese speaker, and became a cool kid by dedicating himself to helping education systems become less fear-based.
Liam Kurmos is founder of the Astralship hackbase project in Snowdonia, Wales. Launched as Astralship.org in January 2017, the project has been converting a 19th century Welsh chapel into a hacker pirate ship.
Bruce Kushnick has been a telecom analyst for 38 years and is the author of The Book of Broken Promises: $400 Billion Broadband Scandal & Free the Net (published 2015). He is the managing director of the Irregulators, a group of telecom experts, analysts, forensic auditors, and lawyers who are working to stop the billions in overcharging, reopen the networks to direct competition, and upgrade them to deliver very high speed fiber to all.
Mark Lam is an artist and educator who works with code and electronics, and has found materials to make accessible technology and tools to explore the computer network. His work references design and critical studies to emphasize the materiality of the Internet, through web applications and hardware. He earned an MPS at NYU Tisch Interactive Telecommunications Program and a bachelors degree in art practice and media studies at UC Berkeley. Previously, Mark was a digital accessibility fellow at Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts and visiting lecturer at Ho Chi Minh City University of Technology and Education.
Chris Landreth was originally trained as a mechanical engineer and eventually decided that making mind-bending animated films would be much more fun. He subsequently joined Alias Inc. (now Autodesk) as the chief development artist of a 3D animation software tool that would eventually be called Maya. During this time, he created two animated short films to develop and test Aliass new software: the end(1995) and Bingo(1998). Later, he worked with the National Film Board of Canada to direct three additional short films. One of these, Ryan, received the Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film in 2005. Chris is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship (2011) for his body of animated film work, and is a distinguished artist in residence with the Dynamic Graphics Project (DGP) at the University of Toronto. He is an expert on observing and animating human faces, and teaches Making Faces, a master class for CG artists wishing to master facial animation. Chris is now co-founder and chief creative officer of JALI Research Inc., a software company specializing in solutions for animating 3D character faces.
Jaron Lanier is an American computer philosophy writer, computer scientist, visual artist, and composer of classical music. Considered a founding father of the field of virtual reality, he left Atari in 1985 to co-found VPL Research, Inc., the first company to sell VR goggles and gloves. In the late 1990s, Jaron worked on applications for Internet2, and in the 2000s, he was a visiting scholar at Silicon Graphics and various universities. In 2006 he began to work at Microsoft, and from 2009 has worked at Microsoft Research as an interdisciplinary scientist. His most recent book is Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now.
Matt Lavigne is an assembly, C, and C++ programmer. He is a strong supporter of encryption, privacy, and software freedom. He is studying mechanical engineering.
Sean Lawson is associate professor of communication at the University of Utah, adjunct scholar at the Modern War Institute at West Point, and non-resident fellow at the Brute Krulak Center for Innovation and Creativity at the Marine Corps University.
leethacks is a computer science professor at an undisclosed university in the United States.
Carrie Leung is a maker-educator focused on building open community platforms for young makers, educators, and industry to collaborate, learn, and connect. Outside the classroom, she built non-profit programs and spaces (MakeFashion Edu and SteamHead in Shenzhen, China) to connect her communities of schools, teachers, and companies with each other and to leverage the amazing technology and manufacturing resources that Shenzhen is famous for.
Kwan Q Li is a Hong Kong interdisciplinary artist, weedist, occupational realist, and more. Coalesced with performance and writing, her research-based practice explores post-colonial intricacies and ideological alternatives within the neoliberal context. Former exhibitions include performances and lectures at the Ashmolean Museum, the AI & Society Journal conference, and IdeasCity residency. Queenie is from the ACT Class of 2022 at MIT.
William Paul Liggett (@junktext) is currently a software engineering professor at both Northern Virginia Community College and at a non-profit educational institution called Year Up. He is also the owner and coder of junktext.com, his small business to develop or teach others about open source software and related subjects. He previously worked in the U.S. defense and intelligence communities and he recently spoke at the FSFs LibrePlanet 2020 on software licensing concepts that he expects his students to comprehend. Because, you know... F/LOSS will eventually dominate the world!
Libby Liu served as the inaugural chief executive officer of the Open Technology Fund, and provided strategic leadership and operational direction to meet OTFs mission of advancing Internet freedom around the world. She led the successful transformation of the eight-year-old OTF program into an independent stand-alone non-profit corporation, maintaining OTF core values and methodology while ensuring uninterrupted operations during the startup phase for the projects, people, and at-risk communities OTF supports globally. Prior to leading OTF, Libby served as president of Radio Free Asia, where in addition to providing strategic vision, supporting innovative programming, directing editorial and administrative policies and procedures, she coordinated issues in these areas with USAGM, stakeholders, and other organizations to address the regions most pressing issues. Prior to joining RFA, she served as the director of administration and strategic planning at the Baltimore headquarters of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). There, she played a pivotal role in the boards establishment of the NAACPs five year strategic plan and in its implementation. Earlier this year she received the 2020 Luxembourg Peace Prize for Technology.
Chris Lombardi is a weaver, a webineer, an aspiring chemist, and an artist. He has been breathing and responding to gravity since the 60s. The last few decades or so, Chris has made a living doing freelance programming and designing web applications. In recent years, while pursuing an education in chemistry, Chris took a fiber arts class and learned to weave on a loom. His life has been transformed ever since!
Alfredo Lpez is a founder and Board member of May First Movement Technology. During his half-century of movement activism, he has been a leader in the Puerto Rican independence, labor, and anti-war movements; organizer of several major national demonstrations and scores of smaller ones; editor of two publications (Claridadand Sevendays Magazine); radio and television producer (and host); college teacher; and author of six published books and hundreds of published articles. His most recent book is Goodies From the Yum Yum Tree: The Internet and Revolution in the Final Days of Capitalism.
Dave Maass (@maassive) is a senior investigative researcher at the Electronic Frontier Foundation and is part of EFFs Threat Lab, which conducts deep-dives into how surveillance technologies are used and abused to target vulnerable populations. He is also the visiting Reynolds professor of media technology at the University of Nevada, Renos Reynolds School of Journalism, teaching cybersecurity, data journalism, and filing Freedom of Information Act requests.
Phillip Maddux is a trusted application security advisor at Signal Sciences. He has over 15 years of experience in information security, with the majority of that time focused on application security in the financial services sector. Throughout his career, Phillip has been a honeypot enthusiast and, in his spare moments, he enjoys converting ideas to code and committing them to GitHub.
Marco creates empowering software, glowing LEDs, and other weird projects.
Naz Markuta is a cybersecurity researcher, focusing on web applications, vulnerability research, and mobile telecoms. Active in multiple public and private bug bounty programs, his current research projects include: building a LTE IMSI catcher, spoofing public emergency alert messages, 5G mobile network and infrastructure, and product and software security testing.
Carlos Martinez (cacu, carlosm2) was born in Mexico City and has extensive experience organizing digital security workshops, as well as a lot of work with human rights organizations, journalists, software developers, and activists around Latin America. For ten years, he has been involved in Free Software, social movements, and privacy. Carlos is part of Hacklab Autonomo, Hackerspace Rancho Electrnico, and Tierra Comun Tech Cooperative.
Freddy Martinez is a technologist and expert on surveillance. He was previously a Ford-Mozilla open web fellow at Freedom of the Press Foundation. During his fellowship, he worked on democratizing access to public records requests with a focus on police accountability and transparency. A longtime Chicagoan, his focus for the future include issues around cell phone privacy, working with marginalized communities, and the intersection of digital rights and activism.
Takasu Masakazu has a great deal of experience at various Maker Faires in Asia, including Maker Faire Shenzhen, Maker Faire Singapore, Shanghai Maker Carnival, and others. He is now based in Shenzhen. His company Switch Science is among the most well known for maker tool platforms and DIY indie products in Japan. He wrote the book Ecosystem by Makers, which is well known in Japan.
George Maschke is a co-founder of AntiPolygraph.org, a non-profit, public interest website dedicated to exposing and ending polygraph-related waste, fraud, and abuse. He is a former U.S. Army interrogator and reserve intelligence officer, and a student of the Arabic and Persian language.
Maggie Mayhem is a former sex worker and current full spectrum doula. She has spoken previously at HOPE as well as DefCon, Skytalks, SxSW, the United Nations Internet Governance Forum, as well as many events and universities around the world. Her website is MaggieMayhem.Com.
India McKinney is the director of federal affairs at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Prior to joining EFF, India spent over ten years in Washington, DC as a legislative staffer to three members of Congress from California. Her work there primarily focused on the appropriations process, specifically analyzing and funding programs in the Departments of Veterans Affairs, Homeland Security, and Justice. Her biggest legislative accomplishment was authorizing, funding, and then naming a new outpatient VA/DoD clinic that will serve over 80,000 people. Indias passion has always been for good public policy, and shes excited to be using skills developed during legislative battles to fight for consumer privacy and for robust surveillance oversight.
Christian McLaughlin is a U.S. Navy veteran, public speaker, and social engineer extraordinaire. Specializing in physical pen-testing, he has been working in the field for quite some time and has studied sociology and how humans interact with each other as a species. He leverages these experiences in order to exploit weaknesses in the security of the organizations that he tests. Lockpicking is fun, but it is always the last thing Christian does. His favorite way of getting access is just asking. He would love to be given the opportunity to break into your organization and help ensure that every weakness gets addressed.
Mek (@mekarpeles) libraries and runs OpenLibrary.org with a vibrant open source community at the non-profit Internet Archive (archive.org). There, he serves in the memory of Open Librarys founder and his hero, Aaron Swartz, to help make millions of books freely accessible to read or borrow. Before joining the Archive, Mek co-founded two small startups, helped lead engineering for two YC companies, and was a regular tinkerer at the Noisebridge hackerspace. In his free time, when rock climbing gyms are closed, Mek helps facilitate Archive Labs (www.archivelab.org), an autonomous, volunteer-run incubator which promotes for open access and public good, is a steering member of the Open Book Genome Project (bookgenomeproject.org), mentors non-profits at ffwd.org, and prototypes open source knowledge maps and tools for thought. You can help him feed San Franciscos hungry at peanutsforgood.org and follow his life progress at mek.fyi.
Allie Mellen is a security strategist at Cybereason. She has spent several years in cybersecurity and has been recognized globally for her security research. Over the past year, she has helped organize and execute multiple election security tabletop exercises with participants from the FBI, Secret Service, Department of Homeland Security, and state law enforcement. In these sessions, its hackers versus law enforcement as an exercise in what attackers can do to disrupt Election Day and what the government is prepared to do - or should be prepared to do - to stop them.
Sara Melson has a unique, distinctive voice that cracks with vulnerability and pierces with strength, echoing blended influences of Cat Power, Mazzy Star, Carole King, Leonard Cohen,, and Patti Smith. She performs and records on piano and guitar, both solo and with band, experimenting live and in the studio with various interpretations of her songs, which have been featured in Huffington Post, American Songwriter, Magnet Magazine, Blackbook, Variety,Yahoo Music, Popmatters, Glide,and on the Apple iTunes homepage. Saras recent batch of songs are about lessons learned, the quest for self-acceptance despite the din of doubt and fear, and wondrous gratitude for the magic of the fleeting present in the face of an uncertain future and inevitable mortality, with productions that blur the boundaries between space-folk, dream-pop, indie-rock, and Americana. She has released three full-length albums and her songs have been featured in Greys Anatomy,among a multitude of other shows, and as the theme for a national Chevy commercial. She has shared the stage with Moby, Ben Folds, Lissie, Inara George, Julianna Hatfield, and Marc Broussard. A new EP, entitled Wild & Precious Life, is due out July 24, 2020.
Joseph Menn is a Reuters investigative journalist and the author of Cult of the Dead Cow: How the Original Hacking Supergroup Might Just Save the World, named one of the ten best nonfiction books of 2019 by Hudson Booksellers. He has written on hacking for 20 years and penned previous books on organized Russian cybercrime and Napster.
Joe Mertz works at the intersection of art and technology, integrating electronics into the live entertainment industry. He first tried Club-Mate in Chicago in 2017 and has since spent his time at Chaos Computer Club events in Germany sampling the fruits of the burgeoning craft-mate scene. He has been brewing his own mate soda and keeping it on tap at Chicagos Pumping Station: One since February 2018, and earlier this year he jumped into the craft-soda business with osMate, which will be the first open source mate soda on the market.
Meta Mate Caf has been operating out of Berlin since 2012, helping to spread the mate culture from many different circles, connecting drinkers around the world with the forests where their fuel comes from. For the past several years Meta Mate Caf has annually hosted a mate chill out space in the Tea House at the CCC conferences in Germany, as well as given mate-making workshops at the food hacking base at camps in Europe.
Micky Metts is involved in the free software for community building movement and the platform cooperativism movement. She helps Agaric LLC of Bostons work contribute back to these movements. She also handles some administrative tasks, public outreach, and support as part of the team. She is a worker/owner of Agaric and a member of the free software for community building movement, using tools like Drupal, BigBlueButton video chat servers, and GNU/Linux. Micky helps people use free software and the Internet to take control of their online presence and stay safe. She started building vibrant online communities in 1996 by building one of the first and largest role playing HTML chat sites on the Internet and hosting one of the first peer-to-peer text-based hacker chat rooms for people to learn HTML, as well as being a pioneer in online video chat servers and creating an early site like YouTube in 1997.
Charlie Mewshaw is the security operations and incident handling team lead at UNC Chapel Hills information security office and co-host of the podcast Data@Rest. Hes a perpetual optimist that things are getting better in the field and that people, not appliances, are at the core of strong security programs. He has the CISSP, CASP, and GPEN certifications. He enjoys making things at work that kick off SCEP alerts and then watching the enterprise monitors try to figure out what just happened. His hobbies include video games, tabletop games, and hiking.
Charlie Meyers has worked on autonomous vehicles and has begun a PhD program in Sweden that focuses on the intersections of computer security, embedded devices, and machine learning.
Eric Michaud is an expert in physical and cybersecurity with over 15 years experience. He has spoken at numerous conferences around the world, and his skill at opening impossible-to-pick locks earned him a place in locksport history with the Michaud Attack. He co-founded and served on the board of directors for The Open Organisation of Lockpickers and is referenced widely in academic papers, talks, and books including Open in Thirty Seconds: Cracking One of the Most Secure Locks in Americaand No Tech Hacking: A Guide to Social Engineering, Dumpster Diving, and Shoulder Surfing. He was a computer and physical security analyst at Argonne National Laboratory, where he worked on nuclear security, counter proliferation tools development, and voting machine security. Eric has an abiding love for projects at the intersection of art and technology, and is a longtime collaborator with the Cacophony Society and Austrian avant-garde art group Monochrom.
Yeshimabeit Milner is the founder and executive director of Data for Black Lives. She has worked since she was 17 behind the scenes as a movement builder, technologist, and data scientist on a number of campaigns. She started Data for Black Lives because for too long she straddled the worlds of data and organizing and was determined to break down the silos to harness the power of data to make change in the lives of Black people. Yeshimabeit has helped change the conversation around big data and technology across the U.S. and globally. She is an Echoing Green Black Male Achievement fellow, an Ashoka fellow, and joins the founders of Black Lives Matter and Occupy Wall Street in the distinguished inaugural class of Roddenberry Foundation fellows. In 2020, she was honored as a Forbes 30 Under 30 Social Entrepreneur.
Rory Mir is a grassroots advocacy organizer, primarily working on the Electronic Frontier Alliance. They are also a doctoral student of psychology at the City University of New York Graduate Center studying activist pedagogy. Before coming to the EFF, they were active in several New York City groups, including the Cypurr Collective, a member of the EFA engaging in community education on matters of cybersecurity. A longtime advocate for open education and open science, they want to break down any barriers folks face to free expression, creativity, or knowledge.
Edward Miro has been in the IT world for 20 years, most recently teaching cyber security classes at Butte College in California. He is currently developing and running a free open source social engineering class called OSEEC. Edward is very passionate about the information security community and is very involved in his local hacker scene and education of the next generation. He is also active online and recently hosted his own mini hacker con for his students.
Ken Montenegro is executive vice president of the National Lawyers Guild and is the technology director at the Center for Constitutional Rights. He is responsible for ensuring technology is used to advance the programmatic objectives of the organization. Previously, Ken was the technology director at Asian Americans Advancing Justice - Los Angeles. He is a co-founder of the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition and of the Radical Connections Network. Ken is a graduate of the Peoples College of Law. He is a longtime activist with grassroots communities and movements, in particular around immigration and policing.
Michael Morgenstern is a filmmaker, technologist, and culture hacker. He has produced and directed three films in over 70 festivals worldwide. Michael focuses on the interaction between social media, news cycles, interaction design, and cultural discourse - and how disinformation is propagated. He is CEO and creative director of This is Definitely Real, an alternate reality media company telling interactive stories online.
Michael Morisy is the co-founder of MuckRock, a leading transparency non-profit that runs DocumentCloud, oTranscribe, and other open source transparency tools dedicated to an informed public.
Orson Mosley is a cybersecurity researcher specializing in low level software reverse engineering. His love of reverse engineering started at 17 with an interest in hacking video games. Over the next few years, he delved into understanding CPU architecture and reverse engineering custom data and compression formats from old school JRPGs. During his first years of employment, he engaged in a wide range of activities, including conducting infrastructure and web application penetration testing in both physical and cloud environments, as well as producing technical configuration documentation. Hes also a hands-on security engineer with a broad spectrum of both physical and virtual security appliances which include firewalls, routers, Linux/Windows, scanners, and SIEM/TVM products. Recently hes delved back into computer architecture and low level system functionality through learning to write 90s DOS and modern Windows malware.
Dominic Muren is founder and principal of The Humblefactory, a design laboratory in Seattle, Washington which develops tools and technologies that increase the capabilities of makers around the world. Since his early career founding the popular industrial design blog IDFuel.com, and writing for Treehugger.com - dubbed The Green CNN - Dominic has been exploring the opportunities and consequences of how we make the objects we need. Since 2008, he has been writing about a new, open-hardware-based, human-scaled ethos for manufacturing at Humblefacture.com. In 2010, he was awarded a TED global fellowship for his work on Humblefacture. In 2011, he was named a PopTech social innovation fellow. In addition to his work at The Humblefactory, Dominic lectures in industrial design and interaction design at the University of Washington in Seattle.
Murph is a longtime desktop Linux user, current Linux sysadmin, and an EFF and FSF supporter. He is currently pursuing his RHCE certification, as well as other esoteric knowledge.
nash leads EFFs grassroots, student, and community organizing efforts. As the lead coordinator of the Electronic Frontier Alliance, nash works to support the Alliances member organizations in educating their neighbors on digital privacy best practices, and advocating for privacy and innovation protecting policy and legislation.
Jay Neuner (@jayneuner) has a background that spans from Silicon Valley to sustainable development, including work with Microsoft, GE, Intel, Ericsson, and various UN agencies. Their interests span a wide range, but for Jay it all comes down to the evolving roles and responsibilities of government, corporations, and society.
Greg Newby (@gbnewby) is a creative thinker with passion for enabling diverse scientific, social, and educational opportunities for all people. He is devoted to the expansion of human intellect and capability through the use of information and computing technologies. His past roles include serving as the chief technology officer of Compute Canada, manager of KAUSTs Supercomputing Core Laboratory, and director of the Arctic Region Supercomputing Center. He has volunteered as the director and CEO of the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, which operates Project Gutenberg, since 2000. [Project Gutenberg (@gutenberg_org) is a library of free online eBooks, and is one of the oldest online content providers in the world. Its mission is to encourage the creation and distribution of eBooks. New Project Gutenberg eBooks are based on published works that do not have United States copyright protection. These eBooks are selected and digitized by volunteers. Project Gutenberg is online at www.gutenberg.org.
Pawel "alxd" Ngei is a hacker, solarpunk, educator and a free software/open notebook science activist interested in neuroscience, technology, and policies around the world. They are creator of the Glider Ink project and a member of Global Innovation Gathering, connecting hackers from the Global South. Pawel is currently not active in any hackerspace.
Yoshinari Nishiki is an artist and researcher based in Rotterdam, The Netherlands. Over the past ten years, Yoshinari has conducted a number of hacking practices: the subjects included a noodle bar, a corner shop, a greeting, a transport system, a Chinese restaurant, bananas, a catering service, a currency, tree climbing, and a programming language. Since Yoshinari moved to Rotterdam, his primary focus largely shifted to logistics systems, running projects that his collaborator professor Lori Tavasszy from TU Delft describes as ridiculing the scale in logistics - free transport by crowd, moving a mountain of agricultural produce with food couriers, and single-handedly flipping a 20-foot container. In 2020, Yoshinari continues working on the concept of one-container container ships with researchers from TU Delft.
SX Noir is a self-proclaimed thot leader, leading the conversation on the intersection of sex work and sex tech. SX has created a podcast (Thot Leader Pod) in an attempt to hack the conversation on sex, love, dating, and tech. Creating more empathy in digital space is the key to intimacy. SX is from Missouri and is very into Frank Sinatra and adult animation. SX aims to de-stigmatize the conversation regarding sex in digital space.
Daniel Nowak has over two decades in the trenches of the global security community, bringing together the technical and kinetic divides. Daniel has extensive public and private sector experience crafting strategy while developing tools and tactics that lead organizations into battle against digital adversaries, malicious insiders, and human error.
Jonn Nubian (@JonnNubian) is one of the organizers of Cyberpunk Now, and is also a producer, hacker, and new media technology infomediary with over 30 years of high profile experience in television, film, music, and new media companies. His expertise and insight pertains to digital media business models, strategy, industry foresight with hardware and software, project management, and out-of-the-box technology solutions in the U.S. and abroad.
Omega is the longtime text files editor at cDc and the man who coined the term hacktivism. He will talk about his forthcoming guide to threat modeling and privacy protections.
Nada O'Neal has been in IT management for a decade, working up through the sysadmin and support ranks. As a woman, shes expected to take care of everyones feelings, but as a tech leader, she needs people to hear and take action on hard, complex truths. Nada has gained a reputation for a simple, firm, but ultimately compassionate approach that makes and sustains change.
Ophie (Peg Nottingham) is an original team member of r00t, and is currently a designer, programmer, and artist. She has designed many r00t and r00tf0lds graphics.
NSDOS is an electronic artist, musician and dancer working with the algorithms, sound, and natural movement as an inspiration for his creative explorations. https://www.facebook.com/nsdoslazerconnect/
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, he counsels on EFF projects and initiatives. Kurt is the lead attorney on the Coders Rights Project. Before joining EFF, he worked at Perkins Coie, where he represented technology clients with respect to intellectual property, privacy, defamation, and other online liability matters. He received his law degree from Boalt Hall, and undergraduate degree from U.C. Santa Cruz. Kurt is the co-authored of Electronic Media and Privacy Law Handbook. In 2007, he was named as one of the Attorneys of the Year by California Lawyer magazine for his work on the OGrady v. Superior Court appeal. In 2014, he was elected to the USENIX board of directors.
Dr. Yulia Ovchinnikova was elected as a council member of the Coordination Center of Top Level Domain Russia (cctld.ru) in 2008. She was the first woman elected to the council. Since then, she moved to the United States and founded Open Hub (openhubproject.com), an open ecosystem and resource center for the tech workforce and tech business in the Hudson Valley. Open Hub is building the local tech community, consulting tech startups and companies, matching business idea generators with developers, teaching coding and organizing education workshops, and is the founder of the Hudson Valleys first tech festival: HV Techfest (hvtechfest.com).
Dr. Travis Paakki is a recent graduate from Colorado Technical University with a computer science doctorate with a focus on information assurance where he focused on public sector infosec challenges. During the day he is an infosec leader in K through 12 education, which led to his dissertation studying information security in K through 12 schools. He has been an avid cybersecurity researcher and advocate since the age of 12 and teaches masters-level networking and cybersecurity at multiple universities.
Evan Padiyil is currently interested in IT and intends to apply to a college with an MIS bachelors degree. Evan loves working with people and computers, always enjoys learning new things, and is open to new ideas.
Josh "Peon" Patrick Paulton (joshhealthcare.com) is a registered clinical counselor with the British Columbia Association of Clinical Counselors in Canada. Josh works in public mental health, and his professional research focuses are mindfulness meditation, gastrointestinal diseases, and consciousness. He is also a clinical hypnotist. Josh combines his experience working professionally in mental health with advanced practical mind/body knowledge to teach how the human mind operates, and how to exploit it. Josh is a magician, and one day will rule earth.
Esther Payne is an IT professional with over 20 years of experience and a BSc (Hons) in computer science from Robert Gordon University. She then discovered she preferred people rather than programming. Having worked with all sizes of businesses and across various industries, her interest has always been on how to make computing more accessible to the masses. She believes that no matter what your age, you can use Linux and free software. As a user of Kubuntu for 12 years, she likes the freedom of Ubuntu and all of its variant distributions. She works with hosting and IT support companies, as well as interesting open source projects. Currently Esther is a part of the LibrecastLive team, a project funded by NLnet for the European Unions Next Generation Internet Initiative as a community and privacy advocate. Having been in open source for over a decade, she believes that anyone can contribute to a project, as everyone has a different skill to bring to a project. The more the merrier. Esther is looking forward to the next stage of the Internet and to help bring it back to its decentralized roots.
Tom Perera is a retired professor of neuroscience who specialized in research on the coding of information in the human brain and nervous system. He has been hunting, collecting, researching, restoring, and writing about Enigmas and their history for over 35 years. He located, restored, and sold the Enigmas that star in The Imitation Gameand Snowden. He provides extensive Enigma information through his Enigma book, his lectures, and his website: www.EnigmaMuseum.com.
Ania Piotrowska did her PhD in anonymous communications systems under George Danezis at University College London, who also designed the original Mixmaster mix network used by anonymous cypherpunk re-mailers. As part of the PANORAMIX project, she published her core design, Loopix, in 2017 at USENIX and is now working to make an open source, performant mix network at Nym Technologies SA as their head of research.
Poly in Frames a.k.a. The Huitbeat Dance Collective is a well-known artist at the 8 Pauli parties in Hamburg. With his cult-like noises that sound like Gameboy, NES, Amiga, C64, and childhood, he never fails to get in the hearts of his audience and to make them dance like never before. Since 2015 he works together with drummer Vincent Golly, who performs his programmed drums live on his drumset.
Fan Popo is a documentary filmmaker, film critic, and LGBT activist from China. His documentaries have focused on performance-based activism and coming out as LGBT in a Chinese context. He graduated from the Beijing Film Academy, and has been a committee member of the Beijing Queer Film Festival since 2008. He is well known for his documentary film Mama Rainbow, in addition to his well publicized legal case against the Chinese state media regulator over censorship of it. He now lives in Berlin, Germany.
Aelon Porat (@whereIsBiggles) is an information security manager at Cision. He has extensive experience attacking and defending corporate environments. Aelon likes to jump inside networks and out of planes, and in his spare time he enjoys demoing, speaking, and providing training at different events and conferences.
J.M. Porup is a cybersecurity reporter, security engineer, and comedian in New York City. Hes studied and performed at Second City, UCB, Magnet, and The PIT. He trained in clown with Chris Bayes (head of clown at the Yale School of Drama) and Philippe Gaulier in France. Tech side: Five years a programmer, a decade as a journalist, and a masters in cybersecurity from UC Berkeley. Check out his comedy at CyberCyberCyberCyber.Ninja.
Tiffany Rad is the CEO and founder of Anatrope, Inc., which develops wireless automotive technologies for the security and data analytics industries. She is also an adjunct in the computer science department at the University of Maines Portland campus and an adjunct at UC Berkeley in the School of Informations cybersecurity program. Prior to starting Anatrope, Tiffany was the manager of operational security for vehicle embedded systems at Cisco and a cybersecurity researcher for Battelle Institute at the Center for Advanced Vehicle Engineering. Her work included vulnerability research on vehicle computers in conjunction with assessing intellectual property laws and legislation as it relates to safety and security in future automotive technologies. She has been presenting vehicle computer security research at security conferences since 2006.
Radio Statler has been broadcasting original content from HOPE to the rest of the world since 2008. You can expect interviews with speakers, extended Q&As, panels, and the occasional glimpse into everything that happens outside the virtual talk rooms.
Keegan Rankin is an advocate for free software and platform cooperativism. He has facilitated several lectures on surveillance capitalism and predictive analytics, and several workshops on free software and encryption as tools for more secure communications.
Alice Rhodes (c0debabe) is a Boston-based veteran web developer training to work in computer security. She is a moderator at hackers.town and a contributor to Projekt:ONI. She enjoys spoiling her two parrots and causing problems on purpose.
Brandon Roberts is a computational journalist and investigative tools consultant who specializes in applying modern technological investigative methods to local journalism. He has worked with ProPublica, the Associated Press, and small nonprofit newsrooms across the U.S. and internationally.
Rockets is the co-founder of Mushroom Cloud Makerspace in Shanghai and one of the people in the China maker community. He created a desktop 3D printer called DreamMaker in 2013. He is an active speaker promoting Maker Culture and a very welcomed coach for many junior robotics/maker competitions. He has initiated many projects to encourage people in the community to make, work, and play together as a team.
Oxblood Ruffin is the godfather of hacktivism and the creator of cDc offshoot Hacktivismo. Now based in Berlin, he will discuss the evolution of hacktivism and current work.
David Ruiz is a senior online privacy writer for Malwarebytes, reporting on online privacy, cybersecurity, and the laws and proposed legislation that regulate how data is stored, shared and accessed. He also helps steer Malwarebytes advocacy against stalkerware-type applications and the companys actions as a founding partner of the Coalition Against Stalkerware. Together with a small, committed team, David has performed online privacy and cybersecurity trainings for domestic abuse advocates and survivors, and he regularly reports on the threats posed by stalkerware. He previously worked for Electronic Frontier Foundation, where he wrote and analyzed policy about NSA surveillance, encryption, and cross-border data transfer. He is not, and never will be, a lawyer.
R¥ is a professional noob and undergrad student studying computer networking and security in Yokohama, Japan. He runs federated services out of a futon closet and is co-founder of The Joeys, a computer security training group that arose from the Fediverse.
Emilie St-Pierre is the security ambassador for Future Ada, a Spokane-based non-profit advocating for diversity and inclusion in STEAM (science, technology, engineering, arts, and mathematics). For the past six years, she has used her experience as an offensive security professional to provide privacy and security education within her community. Through her work with Future Ada, she has established free regular workshops and one-on-one technical support to the public. Emilies focus has been to provide these workshops and services to underrepresented members of the public.
Karen Sandler is a cyborg lawyer and advocate for rights related to software on medical devices. She is the executive director of Software Freedom Conservancy.
Todd Schiller has more than a decades experience building analytics and decision support systems. Hes the maintainer of the Open Synthesis (www.opensynthesis.org), an open source web application for the analysis of competing hypotheses.
Nathan Schneider (@ntnsndr) is an assistant professor of media studies at the University of Colorado Boulder, where he leads the Media Enterprise Design Lab. He is the author of Everything for Everyone: The Radical Tradition that Is Shaping the Next Economy, published by Nation Books.
Bruce Schneier is an internationally renowned security technologist, called a security guru by The Economist.He is The New York Timesbest-selling author of 14 books - including Click Here to Kill Everybody- as well as hundreds of articles, essays, and academic papers. His influential newsletter Crypto-Gramand blog Schneier on Security are read by over 250,000 people. He is a fellow at the Berkman-Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University; a lecturer in public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School; a board member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, AccessNow, and the Tor Project; and an advisory board member of EPIC and VerifiedVoting.org. He is the chief of security architecture of Inrupt, Inc.
Roel Schouwenberg has over 20 years of experience in the security field. He has engaged in long-term campaign and actor tracking across the cyber, influence, and information domains. One of Roels areas of interest is how state actors are leveraging offensive cyber and social media for deniable operations.
Jason Scott is free-range archivist at the Internet Archive, founder of TEXTFILES.COM and co-founder of Archive Team. He knows. Run.
Phillip Scroggins is an educator who has retired from the New York City school system and loves to explore the globe. He and Marjorie George have been traveling the world together (mostly during summer vacations) for over 20 years and, between them, have visited every continent on Earth, over 90 percent of that travel having been done using airline miles.
Andrew Seeder is a researcher based in Boston. He was trained as a facilitator by community organizers while at the Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative. He regularly facilitates meetings, workshops, trainings, and other activities in order for groups to be more productive and reach consensus. He has helped organize cryptoparties in the Boston area since 2015. He has presented at the intersection of organizing and technology at LibrePlanet in 2016 and 2017. Recently, he taught Hit Refresh: Critical Perspectives on Power, Data, and Technology at the Experimental College at Tufts University.
Olivia Seow has a mission to make scary, gate-kept tech friendly and accessible to all. She has taught artists, designers, and musicians who would like to quickly understand and prototype creative tech. She is currently pursuing creative machine learning and human-computer interaction as a graduate student at MIT.
David Sidi is a PhD student at the School of Information, University of Arizona. His research centers on privacy technology. David recently presented on shoulder surfing in the age of intelligent video (the analog keyhole problem), adversarial transparency as a response to the use of shared Wi-Fi as a privacy honeypot, and getting useful harmful content reports from users of pornographic websites with SecureDrop submission supplemented by automated video analysis.
James Simpson, manufacturer turned educator, empowers education communities with spaces, events, lessons, and materials. His goal is to allow students to learn by hacking, problem solving, and making their own choices.
Dr. Aditya K. Sood is a security practitioner, researcher, and consultant. With experience of more than 12 years, he provides strategic leadership in the field of information security covering products and infrastructure. He has research interests in cloud security, malware automation and analysis, application security, and secure software design. His work has been featured in several media outlets including Associated Press, Fox News, The Register, The Guardian, Business Insider, CBC and others. Currently, Aditya is a senior director of threat research and development at F5 Networks.
Kal Spelletich has for almost four decades built interactive machines and robots. His work enacts a liberated awareness and pushes his audience toward creative responses to technology in their lives. It explores the interface of humans and science to put people in touch with philosophical interactive experiences.
Dr. Kotikalapudi Sriram is a senior engineer at the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in Gaithersburg, Maryland.
stakfallt is an IT specialist and hacker of many things.
Kirk Strauser is a dedicated generalist who knows too little about too much. His specialties are designing scalable web services, making complicated things simpler, and cultivating a healthy dose of paranoia. He is somewhat fanatical about health care security and privacy.
Dr. Kit Stubbs is a non-binary/queer/femme maker and entrepreneur whos more interested in people than in tech. After earning their PhD in robotics from Carnegie Mellon University, Kit is now the founder and executive Director of the Effing Foundation for Sex-Positivity (effing.org), a 501(c)(3) nonprofit that has awarded over $150,000 in grants to sex-positive artists and educators across the U.S. Kit has spoken on gender, sexuality, and sex/tech at events across the U.S. They blog about technological empowerment for sexuality and pleasure (toymakerproject.com) and co-organize teasecraft, a meetup group for sex/kink-positive makers and hackers (teasecraft.com).
Jia-Yong Tao provides tech support at Mushroom Cloud Makerspace in Shanghai. He is a former Odyssey of the Mind (OM) coach. His team won the campaign in 2018.
The Tarquin is a Seattle-based hacker, security researcher, and philosophy school dropout. His areas of research include the role of phenomenology in computers and the ways in which we use computers to lie to ourselves and one another.
Tech Learning Collective is an apprenticeship-based technology school for radical organizers headquartered in New York City that provides a security-first IT infrastructure curriculum to otherwise underserved communities and organizations advancing social justice causes. They train politically self-motivated individuals in the arts of hypermedia, information technology, and radical political practice. Founded and operated exclusively by radical queer and femme technologists, they offer unparalleled free, by-donation, and low-cost computer classes on topics ranging from fundamental computer literacy to the same offensive computer hacking techniques used by national intelligence agencies and military powers (cyber armies).
Thomas Tempe is a migrant of the global village. He grew up, studied, and worked mostly in France, where he fell in love with computers, then Free Software. Hes been living in China for close to ten years now. Hes an aspiring musician. Hed do anything to not learn the piano. He has a wife and son, and a day job in manufacturing. He once started a Linux Users Group, built a straw bale house, and became a fluent Chinese speaker after age 30. When time allows, he goes to jam at the Shanghai hackerspace, or hits the keyboard for more hacker points.
The_Gibson is the admin/operator of hackers.town, founder of DefCon502, an 80s/90s hacker kid, infosec consultant, and fiery defender of privacy and human liberty. When not advocating for distributed platforms, he likes to plan how to secure enterprises and free the Internet from the clutches of megacorps, you know, just cyberPunk things....
Richard Thieme is a former priest who became a commentator on technology and culture, founding the consulting firm ThiemeWorks. He is the author of the syndicated column Islands in the Clickstream, which was published in 60 countries and in 2004 was turned into a book of the same name. In 2010 he published a book of short stories (Mind Games) and in 2012 he contributed to the peer-reviewed academic work, UFOs and Government, a Historical Inquiry. Regarded as a member of the cyber avant-garde, Richard has spoken at various conferences since the mid-1990s, focusing on the impact of new technologies on individuals and organizational structures, with an emphasis on security and intelligence, and he has become somewhat of a father figure to many in the hacker subculture.
TProphet has worked for 30 years to make the hacker world more open, more approachable, and more inclusive. Since 1990, he has been a regular writer and columnist for 2600. His Telecom Informer column, which is published in every issue, is written in the irreverent persona of a longtime telephone central office employee. Each column explores a different piece of telecommunications technology and explains the inner workings of it.
Alexander Urbelis is a co-host of Off The Hook, a frequent writer for CNN Opinion, an attorney and partner of the Blackstone Law Group in New York, creator of a unique DNS intelligence platform used to detect early stage indicators of malicious activity, and was also recently the acting CISO of the NFL. Alex has a degree in philosophy, summa cum laude, from Stony Brook University, a JD, magna cum laude, from Vermont Law School, and the BCL from New College, Oxford University.
Matthew Valites had his first online experiences as a tween in the early 1990s, dialing into local BBSes on the familys home-built Radio Shack Tandy and clogging the phone lines playing Doomdeath matches with friends. By 14, he had ground his first set of lockpicks out of his dads hacksaw blades, subsequently ruining every lock in the house. Under the tutelage of his older brother in the early 2.0 kernel days, Matt learned how to run Linux, forever influencing the rest of his professional life. Hes the author of OReillys Crafting the InfoSec Playbook, creator and host of Wall of Sheeps Lockpick Gauntlet, and a forever curious maker and breaker.
Madison Vialpando (@madisonvialpan2) is a recent graduate from the Reynolds School of Journalism at the University of Nevada, Reno. In 2019 and 2020 , she worked as a student researcher and intern with the Electronic Frontier Foundations Threat Lab, compiling data on law enforcement technology along the U.S.-Mexico border. Her final research project focused on cybersecurity vulnerabilities in law enforcement agencies. Madison is currently a freelance journalist looking for new opportunities to scrutinize law enforcement and corporate surveillance.
vr0n (@_vr0n) is a cybersecurity student who has worked on several research projects related to virtualization, containers, data provenance, IoT security, fuzzing, and binary exploitation. They have posted some boring stuff at vr0n.tech, but plan on posting more interesting stuff soon. Super into decentralized tech and mesh Internet.
Xiaowei Wangis an artist, a writer, and a coder They are the creative director at Logic Magazine,and their work encompasses community-based and public art projects, data visualization, technology, ecology, and education. Their projects have been finalists for the Index Award and featured by The New York Times, the BBC, CNN, VICE, and more. They are working toward a PhD at UC Berkeley where they are a part of the National Science Foundations Research Traineeship program in Environment and Society: Data Science for the 21st Century.
Rebecca Jiang Weijie is the operations manager of Mushroom Cloud Maker Space in Shanghai, China. She is also a co-founder of the Shanghai Maker Carnival, which is one of the biggest maker events in China with more than 90,000 visitors.
Kyle Wiens (@kwiens) is the CEO of iFixit, the free-as-in-speech repair manual. Hes dedicated his life to defeating the second law of thermodynamics, a battle fought in the courtroom as often as in the workshop. The Right to Repair campaign has, so far, successfully legalized cell phone unlocking and tractor repair and has legislation pending in over 20 U.S. states in 2020.
Brice Williams is the cybersecurity practice lead for technology consulting firm SysLogic, Inc. and has over 20 years of experience in software engineering and security best practices. Brice serves as a trusted advisor to global organizations providing modern cybersecurity guidance and support, including developer training, application penetration testing, secure product design, and secure development lifecycle programs. Brice has developed and conducted cybersecurity training classes for thousands of software developers around the world and is passionate about improving the state of cybersecurity at the earliest stages of software development. He is a regular speaker at industry conferences and local meetups, sharing from his practical experience in the field.
Michael G. Williams is the network security team lead for UNC Chapel Hills information security office and co-host of the podcast Data@Rest. Hes been with UNC Chapel Hill for 11 years. Prior to coming to UNC, he spent a decade managing network security services for large enterprise clients in the telecom industry. Michael has the CISSP and PCNSE certifications. In his free time, he pursues any number of hobbies, including tabletop games, podcasting, and his many pets.
David Williams-King is finishing his PhD in binary security at Columbia University. He is now involved in the NYC-based startup Elpha Secure. David learned to be a hacker in a solar-powered home with limited electricity and Internet - his interests and also his environment itself all require constant ingenuity. David enjoys teaching, building computers, traveling (under normal circumstances), and writing code by voice (see The Eleventh HOPE).
Holmes Wilson is an Internet freedom activist whose work mixes mass mobilization and software tools. He is a co-founder and board member of Fight for the Future, the activism organization that was instrumental in defeating the infamous U.S. site-blocking laws SOPA/PIPA, fighting for net neutrality rules in the U.S. and Europe, opposing law enforcement crypto backdoors, and, more recently, challenging the use of face recognition tech by U.S. law enforcement and products like Amazon Ring. He also previously co-founded Miro, a free software video player based on BitTorrent and RSS, and was a campaign manager at the Free Software Foundation. Hes currently building Zbay, a peer-to-peer app for secure messaging and marketplaces built on the privacy-focused cryptocurrency Zcash.
Robin Wilton is the Internet Societys director for Internet trust. He is a specialist in digital identity, privacy, IT security, and public policy, with a background of 35 years as a systems engineer, consultant, and industry analyst in companies including IBM, Sun Microsystems, and Gartner Group. His recent work includes publication of privacy and data protection guidelines for Africa, encryption guidance for CEOs, and a paper on ethical data handling.
Nancy C. Wolfson is a Washington DC-based scholar, independent researcher, speaker, entrepreneur, and artist. She is currently the vice chair of the International Astronautical Federation (IAF) Technical Committee on Near Earth Objects (NEOs). She is president of Disrupting Space Company based in the United States. Her work is primarily focused on education, research, communication, and outreach for diverse space sectors. Some of her most recent work includes contributing to the International Asteroid Warning Network (IAWN), She is a signatory for United Nations Declaration for Asteroid Day, an awareness and educational program designated to teach the world about asteroids. She was named space ambassador and media communications representative for Yuris Night, an event in 2019 that celebrated astronaut Yuri Gagarins work. She also participated in The Space Generation Advisory Council (SGAC) Find an Asteroid Search Campaign in 2018. Through her work as an independent researcher, she was invited to participate in The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) - Nation of Makers Meeting in 2016. Nancys objective is to democratize access to higher learning, making space concepts accessible to all academia, corporations, and the broad general public.
Meng Weng Wong is principal investigator at the Research Programme for Computational Law at Singapore Management University, and co-founder of legalese.com, a venture-funded computational law startup. He previously co-founded pobox.com and co-authored RFC4408, the SPF anti-spam standard for email authentication. He didnt do very well in his undergrad languages and compilers class at upenn.edu, but is making up for it now with a vengeance: after fellowships at Harvards Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society and at Stanfords CodeX Center for Legal Informatics, he is now leading design and development of a DSL for law. After moving from Silicon Valley to Singapore where he now lives with his co-founder and life partner, he helped start hackerspace.sg, Singapores first hacker/maker space. He works in Emacs, Typescript, Haskell, and Prolog. He would like to learn Curry next, with all the copious free time available now that he has completed Zelda: Breath of the Wild.
Michal rysiek Wozniak is chief information security officer at the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project. He is a policy hacker, a founding member of the Warsaw Hackerspace; and a member of the board of Polish Linux Users Group. A digital human rights activist, Michael is a participant in a number of policy consultations and debates on Polish and EU-level topics ranging from Internet censorship through data retention, net neutrality, and copyright reform, to open education resources.
X is an original team member of r00t and the official r00t hacker archivist and purveyor of the best hacker stickers on Planet Earth.
Rockets Xia is the co-founder of Mushroom Cloud makerspace and one of the first batch of senior makers in the community in China. He created a desktop 3D printer called DreamMaker in 2013. He is an active speaker to promote maker culture and is a very welcomed coach at many junior robotics/maker competitions.
The XLterrestrials are community artists, writers, independent media activists (and analysts), VJ/DJ/XJs, event producers, and co-founders of CiTiZEN KiNO. Collaborations have included Transmediale Festival, Haus der Kulturen (HKW), Piranha Music, Chaos Communication Congress, Hellerau Theater in Dresden, Dokumenta, Ars Electronica, KulturBrauerei, MS Stubnitz, Czech Zentrum Berlin, A4 in Bratislava, Klub Mama, Kinema Ikon, C-Base, Noisebridge, EFF, ATA/Other Cinema, CellSpace, Journal Of Aesthetics and Protest, Regenbogenfabrik (cinema), RogueArt (music label), etc.
Johnny Xmas is a predominant personality in the information security community, most well known for his work on the TSA Master Key leaks between 2014 and 2018 (all presented at HOPE!). Currently working with the security engineering firm GRIMM as an AppSec consultant and trainer, he was previously the director of field engineering at the anti-bot vendor Kasada. Prior to that, he was the lead consultant on Uptakes industrial cybersecurity platform. Johnny has spent many years in the field as a penetration tester, focusing heavily on both IT and physical security of financial and medical facilities, and has served in security engineering for global Fortune 500 retail corporations.
Jiang Xueqin (@xueqinjiang) is a China-based educator and writer. He advises Chinese schools on how to teach creativity, and he writes for a variety of Chinese and global media. He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts (RSA), a judge of the Global Teacher Prize, and a researcher at the Global Education Innovation Initiative at Harvard Graduate School of Education.
Lucy Yanow was born into a long line of activists, artists, teachers, yentas, horse thieves, and general rabble rousers. She honors that lineage in the way she approaches her work. She practices as a full spectrum doula. She is an instructor for Cornerstone Doula Trainings who teaches advanced full spectrum doula training which specifically explores the intersections between harm reduction, doula work, and abortion care; as a social work associate in the Womens Options Clinic at San Francisco General Hospital; a student midwife in a home birth apprenticeship; and is studying midwifery through the National Midwifery Institute. She has been working in reproductive health since 2005.
Dan York (@danyork) is an advocate for an open Internet who has been online since the 1980s. He leads the Internet Societys Open Standards Everywhere (OSE) project with a goal of making websites faster, more available, and more secure using IPv6, TLS, HTTP/2, and DNSSEC. He has a strong interest in encryption and DNS security/privacy, and spent ten years focused on Voice over IP (VoIP) / telecom security and applications. Dan produces podcasts and, before the pandemic, could be found in the winter throwing rocks in curling clubs.
Rachel Zhang is currently strategic partnership manager for DFRobot, specializing in STEM and maker education. In addition to being the community manager of Mushroom Cloud makerspace and a committee member of Shanghai Maker Carnival, she is active in promoting maker culture and maker education to bring the joy and social value of innovation through creation to everyone. She is also actively exploring her talent in the improv theatre area in her spare time. She is now working on some projects integrating innovative technology with performance, music, and other forms of art, such as a theatre for children with interactive maker projects.
Kevin Zheng is a 12-year-old student at Shanghai YK Pao secondary school. He is familiar with Arduino and Python. He has made his own KSP controller.