Mitch Altman is an international hacker, inventor, entrepreneur, author, mentor, best known for starting Noisebridge hackerspace and inventing TV-B-Gone, which turns off TVs in public places. He did pioneering work in virtual reality in the mid 1980s and was co-founder of 3ware, a successful SillyValley startup in the 1990s. He has visited hundreds of hackerspaces around the world. He mentors, teaches soldering, and promotes open hardware and community wherever he goes.
Louis Barrett is a security researcher with a focus on unlocking the offensive and defensive capabilities of artificial intelligence. He is currently working at Exaforce as their lead security researcher, and previously led product security at Scale AI. He is also the founder of AZAI Security Research, a security firm utilizing AI agents to improve security outcomes.
Eliza Bettinger is a member of Library Freedom Project and the lead librarian for digital scholarship at Cornell University Library, where she helps scholars and students get the hang of digital approaches to research. She works with maps, text, data, images, visualizations, networks, codes, and always, people and their questions. She sees Internet literacy - technical, social, and economic - as the fundamental to the pedagogical work of librarians.
Katelyn "medus4" Bowden is a hacker, activist, and Cult of the Dead Cow member who embraces the human side of hacking and tech. Katelyn has dedicated her life to changing the world for the positive - between her work fighting nonconsensual pornography and her dedication to educating users on security, she is committed to making the Internet a safer place for everyone. Her alignment is chaotic good, with a hard emphasis on the chaos. She also creates strange furby art and has over 60 dead things on display in her house.
Bill Budington is a longtime activist, cryptography enthusiast, and a senior staff technologist on EFF's public interest technology team. His research has been featured in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Guardian, and cited by the U.S. Congress. He is the lead developer of Cover Your Tracks (formerly Panopticlick) and apkeep, has led HTTPS Everywhere from 2015 to 2018, and has contributed to projects like Let's Encrypt and SecureDrop. His primary interest lies in dismantling systems of oppression, building up collaborative alternatives, and, to borrow a phrase from Zapatismo, fighting for a "world in which many worlds fit."
Erica Burgess is a cybersecurity and AI architect, and was previously a software engineer, red teamer, pentesting lead, and has been hacking since high school. Since then, she has been earning bug bounties and CVEs and presenting her offensive security research at various conferences.
Fae Carlisle holds a Master's degree in cybersecurity. Since a kid, she's been a hacker and pursued it into a career path. She works as a threat intelligence researcher and enjoys tracking and uncovering new threats.
Dr. Spring Cooper is an associate professor at CUNY's Graduate School of Public Health and Health Policy (CUNY SPH). Her research is focused on adolescent sexuality and sexual health, with broader themes of addressing sexual stigma, improving sexuality communication, and promotion of healthy sexuality through educational and public health interventions, including HPV vaccination. As 2020 began to shift how we think about the university in various ways, her research has also adopted new interests: exploring anti-racist and trauma-informed practices in the classroom. She was also the first person in New York to press charges for nonconsensual intimate image sharing, and is now an advocate for survivors.
Cory Doctorow is a science fiction author, activist, and journalist. He is the author of many books, most recently The Bezzle (a follow-up to Red Team Blues) and The Lost Cause, a solarpunk science fiction novel of hope amidst the climate emergency. His most recent nonfiction book is The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation, a big tech disassembly manual. In 2020, he was inducted into the Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame.
Reanna Esmail is a member of Library Freedom Project and the lead librarian for instruction at Cornell University. She is particularly interested in critical pedagogy and providing services for various campus communities, especially those that have historically been underserved and underrepresented.
Aisling Fae (transfaeries) is a plural system of artists, witches, and software engineers based in New York City. Fae has extensive experience with machine learning systems in industry, academia, and through various artistic projects, and is also a contributor to the anthology Meanwhile, Elsewhere: Science Fiction and Fantasy from Transgender Writers, as well as regularly self-publishing both fiction and non-fiction on transfaeries.com. When not developing AI chatbots live on Twitch, Fae enjoys socializing on Discord and cycling around New York City.
Cara Gagliano is senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation who focuses on trademark, copyright, and free speech issues.
Johannes Grenzfurthner manipulates people to positively respond to his lies and made-up realities, and he feeds off these emotions. He is an award-winning artist, filmmaker, author, and performer. He lives and works in Vienna, Austria. He is the founder and artistic director of monochrom, an internationally acting art and theory group and film production company. His last feature-length documentaries were Traceroute (2016), Glossary of Broken Dreams (2018), and Hacking at Leaves (2024). His last features were the horror films Masking Threshold (2021) and Razzennest (2022). He is working on the horror feature Solvent (to be released in 2024). He is head of Arse Elektronika, a sex and tech festival in San Francisco, and organizer of Roboexotica, the Festival for Cocktail-Robotics in Vienna.
Wesley Hales is a longtime security engineer who has built products for many black box, closed source, cybersecurity companies. Today, he is a cofounder at LeakSignal, an open and free solution/project for anyone who needs to defend their networks, APIs, and data.
Derek Hobbs was born and raised in New London, Connecticut and has been involved with computing technology, phone phreaking, and hacking since the early 90s. He has attended Beyond HOPE, H2K, and H2K2, and most recently he has gotten involved in volunteering at Cyphercon and Milwaukee Bsides. He currently works as an IT security analyst for a small company in Milwaukee, Wisconsin and recently obtained the CompTIA CySA+ certification. He is a father of three kids that he involves in programming and electronics projects. The projects range from scratch programming to Arduino projects.
Luke Iseman is cofounder of Make Sunsets; he launches balloons full of sulfur dioxide to the stratosphere. Previously, he's done less ambitious DIY plus startup stuff.
Dr. Jen, PharmD is a software engineer who also completed a Doctor of Pharmacy. In short, she's a computer geek and a drug geek. She has a keen interest in health information, finding the truth, and sharing what she's found in a way non-drug geeks can understand.
Mallory Knodel is the CTO at the Center for Democracy and Technology in Washington, DC and the co-chair of the Human Rights Protocol Considerations research group of the Internet Research Task Force. She was a member of the Internet Architecture Board. She is an advisor to the Freedom Online Coalition, the Open Technology Fund, and several public interest implementers of security, privacy, and circumvention tools.
Evan Light is an associate professor of communication at York University's Glendon College in Toronto, Canada and originally hails from the pine barrens of New Jersey. He does research on surveillance and aims to do something about it. He also smokes a mean tuna.
Beryl Lipton is investigative researcher at the Electronic Frontier Foundation who focuses on government transparency and law enforcement surveillance technology.
M' has been in love with computers as long as he remembers. The professional side of this relationship has taken him to work as dependability expert on some of the largest and most famous distributed systems in the world. As a hobby and a pleasure, M' likes to play in domains like system security and cryptography. M' is a privacy advocate and will never tire of sharing tips for staying safe and private on the Internet.
Alison Macrina is an activist librarian and the director of Library Freedom Project. She started LFP in 2015 to organize and build community with other librarians who are dedicated to library values of privacy, intellectual freedom, social responsibility, and the public good.
Jeff Man, INFOSEC curmudgeon, is a respected information security advocate/evangelist, trusted advisor, international keynoter, co-host on Paul's Security Weekly, and Tribe of Hackers (TOH) contributor. As a certified NSA cryptanalyst, he designed and fielded the first SW-based cryptosystem produced by NSA, designed a cryptographic cipher wheel used by U.S. Special Forces for over a decade, and was the principal architect of the first NSA "Red Team."
Chris Meyer was born in southern Wisconsin and attended the University of Wisconsin - Madison for engineering. He should have gone to dental school and made a lot of money, but screwed up and ended up a poor (in both ways) engineer instead.
Paul "The_Gibson" Miller is the founder/leader/community organizer of hackers.town, Optimistic Nihilists Inc. organizer and founder, hacker, infosec professional, and passionate privacy advocate. Paul has worked to show the ways a centralized Internet has harmed our culture and the future. He believes you should always be N00bin', and that collectively we can restore the promise of the future the Internet once offered us.
Dr. Greg Newby has a lifelong interest in the expansion of human intellect and capability through use of information and computing technologies. He has worked in information science, supercomputing, climate science, and has been an innovator in education, online community-building, and digital literacy.
Alessandro Polidoro is an attorney at law and digital rights advocate experienced in IT law, criminal law, and digital forensics. As an independent lawyer, he collaborates with different NGOs and law firms located across Europe, Africa, and North America, being responsible for cases pertaining to privacy, cybercrimes, and the safeguard of workers' rights. Core activity of his work is offering legal protection against hate crimes and gender-based violence, particularly with regard to image-based sexual abuse.
Bill Reyor is the director of security at Modus Create, specializing in DevSecOps, AI/LLM security, and software supply chain integrity. He has extensive experience in incident response and has held CISO roles in higher education. Bill leads the OWASP Connecticut chapter and contributes to the OWASP Top 10 for the LLM apps project. He co-founded Security BSides Connecticut, promoting community and knowledge since 2011. As a queer hacker, Bill champions diversity in cybersecurity to enhance problem-solving and mitigate groupthink.
Dr. Saul D. Robinson is a husband, father, and walker of two dogs. He is an American immigrant born in the United Kingdom and a long term resident of St. Louis, Missouri. Beginning his education with a degree in physics, he forgot to stop and ended up with far too many pieces of paper from academic, professional, and government bodies. Transitioning from a two-decade aviation career, he founded Fraign Analytics. At Fraign, he develops innovative AI and machine learning applications focusing on aviation systems and multilingual NLP. Dr. Robinson's academic work includes numerous journal articles and pending patents in cooperative AI technologies.
rolltime is a maker, writer, and computer priestess. She's interested in democratized computing, sustainable agriculture, and how people and technology each shape the other. She lives in New York City.
Kimberly Springer is a member of Library Freedom Project and co-director of the Columbia Privacy Lab. Kimberly thinks and creates in the spaces of the surveillance state, Black feminist praxis, digital culture, social movements, and media.
Tilde Thurium is a San Francisco based artist, activist, and engineer. By day they are a free and open source software advocate at deepset. They can probably deadlift more than you. Ask them about how to paint an algorithm, the intersections between mutual aid and biology, or which coast has the best vegan croissants.
Marc Weber Tobias is the author of eight books on security, locks, law, and police communications. He gave several presentations at different HOPE conferences and wrote one of the primary references in the lock industry: Locks, Safes, and Security. His team was also responsible for analyzing Medeco's high-security locks and determining four keys that could allow their locks to be bumped or picked worldwide. Marc is a lawyer and was chief of the Organized Crime Unit for the Office of the Attorney General in South Dakota. He runs a security team that works for many of the largest lock manufacturers in the world. His latest book, Tobias on Locks and Insecurity Engineering, is a 700-page treatise that explains why locks can be defeated and provides many examples of what he defines as "insecurity engineering."
Tess Wilson is the deputy director of Library Freedom Project, and also a librarian who loves talking loudly about digital literacy, equitable access, and citizen science.
Hannah Zhao is staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation who focuses on criminal justice, privacy, and cybersecurity issues.
