Marc Alessi is an attorney and startup entrepreneur. He serves as executive director of Tesla Science Center at Wardenclyffe and Business Incubator Association of New York State. He is a board member of Peconic Bay Hospital - Northwell Health and former board member of East End Arts Council, Nassau Suffolk Law Services, and Long Island Power Authority. As an assemblyman, Marc secured an $850,000 grant for Wardenclyffe, which energized a record-breaking crowdfund that raised $1.4 million in six weeks from 33,000 investors. He views Wardenclyffe as a temple to technology that continues Tesla's legacy through innovators of today.
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 SillyValley 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.
Gus Andrews has a background that spans hacking, education, and software usability. She is currently working with Theorem Media on CyberNation, a multimedia public education project about digital security. Her book Keep Calm and Log On (MIT Press, 2020) aims to help everyday people survive the digital revolution without getting trampled. Over the past decade, Gus has improved everyday users' understanding of digital security through her work at the Open Internet Tools Project, Simply Secure, and reviving the Security in a Box guide for Front Line Defenders. Her work on open source encryption tools informed policy at the EFF and the U.S. State Department. She has been a regularly invited speaker at the Army Cyber Institute at West Point (improbably, because she created The Media Show, a YouTube series teaching media literacy using snarky puppets). Gus is a former panelist on the hacker radio show Off The Hook and a former organizer for HOPE.
Soya Aoyama (@SoyaAoyama) is a cybersecurity researcher at Fujitsu System Integration Laboratories Limited. Soya has been working for Fujitsu for more than 20 years as a Windows software developer, and has been developing NDIS drivers, Bluetooth profiles, WinSock applications, and more. About seven years ago, Soya started security research, and mainly researches attacks using Windows DLLs, and has talked at many conferences around the world. Soya is founder and organizer of BSides Tokyo, and hosted the first one in 2018.
Austin Bennett designs systems to help move, share, gather insights from data, and develop products efficiently. He is also a cognitive linguist with a focus on multimodal communication. He is passionate about education and sharing knowledge, having reached thousands of people in interactions ranging from one-on-one to large group training. Austin is a Google developer expert (Google Cloud) and an Apache Beam committer; he encourages people to get involved with open source software however sensible. When not on a computing machine, Austin can most often be found on the water in the San Francisco Bay, in the nearby hills on a bike, or on a doubles squash court.
Emma Best (@NatSecGeek) is a journalist and transparency advocate who has filed thousands of FOIA requests with government agencies and written hundreds of articles. They co-founded the DDoSecrets collective and work with source submissions and the receipt of data. They are married to fellow collective member Xan North, and raise a kid and two cats together.
BiaSciLab (@BiaSciLab, @GirlsWhoHack, @SecureOpenVote) is a 15-year-old hacker and maker. She was the youngest speaker at HOPE and has spoken at DEF CON in the Voting Village, Bio Hacking Village, and the r00tz Asylum kids con. She has spoken internationally on election security and has had her work highlighted at the congressional hearing on election security. This inspired her to build her own election system: Secure Open Vote. She is also 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.
Elizabeth Biddlecome is a consultant and a part-time instructor at City College San Francisco, delivering technical training and mentorship to students and professionals.
Steve Bossert began his career working for a cellular network service provider performing quality assurance, and later moved into network design focused on location-based services. He has been a licensed amateur radio operator since 1998 while in high school and, before that, was involved in scanning, shortwave monitoring, and citizens band radio. Currently holding the callsign K2GOG, Steve is one of the co-founders of Hudson Valley Digital Network in 2017 and he enjoys RF electronic and antenna design, along with satellite communications, portable QRP operation across all bands, emerging technologies, and convergence of radio communications with other interests. Steve helped the Hudson Valley Digital Network to assist many people in finding new areas of interest involving radio communications. For the past 15 years, Steve has been a business strategist, helping a wide range of organizations navigate different market and technology issues. He currently is director of global sales for BCC Research. Steve currently resides in Poughkeepsie, NY along with his family.
Sam Bowne has been teaching computer networking and security classes at City College San Francisco since 2000. He founded Infosec Decoded, Inc., and does corporate training and consulting for several Fortune 100 companies on topics including incident response and secure coding.
Douglas Brantner is an MRI research engineer working on sensors, electronics, software, and simulations for MRI as well as ultrasound. He was inspired to change careers and go back to school several years ago at HOPE. In his brief time in this new field, he has already been co-author on two academic MRI conference presentations, one of which is now a project on OpenSourceImaging.com.
Tom Brennan leads the U.S. arm of CREST International and works with government and commercial organizations to optimize the value of CREST as a cybersecurity accreditation body and industry standards advocate. He is a U.S. Marine veteran and is currently the chief information officer of the national law firm Mandelbaum Barrett, where he oversees critical infrastructure, privacy, and security operations.
Bill Budington is a longtime activist, cryptography enthusiast, and a senior staff technologist on EFF's tech projects 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 Panopticlick, 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." He loves hackerspaces and getting together with other techies to tinker, code, share, and build the technological commons.
Arctic Byte is a long time cryptography and cryptocurrency enthusiast, with experience operating physical and digital infrastructure during each of the iterations of the Web (1,2,3). Currently working on decentralized infrastructure projects in technical roles, part of his job is to keep up-to-date on the latest iterations in privacy as it relates to the cryptocurrency space, and research the usability and feasibility of various methods and their implementations.
Dan Calacci (@dcalacci) is a doctoral candidate at the MIT Media Lab studying how data stewardship and analysis can impact community governance. Dan's research has been published in top international conferences on computational social science, machine learning, and data ethics. His art has been exhibited globally, and his writing and work have appeared in Gizmodo, Wired, Reuters, The New York Times, and other major publications.
Kevin Carter (@shotintoeternit) is a writer, technologist, and musician whose work has been featured in MAKE, 2600, and The Fiction Circus, among others. He runs the hypermedia reading series Derangement of the Senses and lives and plays laser harp in New York City. You can find more at shotintoeternity.com.
Ramon Castillo (Autumn Ate Everything) teaches several music technology and Composition for New Media courses at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell. His classes include Music and Sound for Games, Digital Synthesis and Remixing, and Contemporary Styles and Analysis. He directs the Contemporary Electronic Ensemble, which focuses on expressive live performance using electronic instruments not limited to DAWs, hardware synths and samplers, circuit bent toys, microcontroller development boards, signal processing units, video synths, and video games. He founded UML's Video Game Ensemble which launches in Fall 2022. His creative output as composer and performer revolves around expressive/automated looping in Ableton Live and real-time Minecraft gameplay. Ramon regularly performs with his daughter, Luna, who got him hooked on Minecraft as a tool for artistic creation.
The Cheshire Catalyst (@Cheshire2600) (Richard Cheshire) was the last editor of the notorious TAP Newsletter of the 1970s and 1980s. (TAP was a predecessor of 2600 Magazine.) In his "share the knowledge" spirit, he has volunteered at every HOPE conference since the first one in 1994. His PHonePHriendly.Com sets up web pages meant to be read on mobile phone web browsers, and allows him to delude himself that he's still into phones as a phreak.
Alannah Clamp (@theglencoeclub) is an artist from Vancouver, British Columbia. She has her Bachelor of Fine Arts in photography from Emily Carr University in Vancouver, Bachelor of Art History from Concordia University in Montreal, and Master of Fine Art from the Glasgow School of Art in Scotland. She has exhibited her photographic and video work in Canada, the U.K., and South Africa.
Rob Cohen (@CohenMathPrep) has been teaching and tutoring in New York City since 2006. After graduating from Wesleyan University with a dual degree in mathematics and music, Rob attended NYU for a master's degree in math education through the Newton Fellowship program sponsored by Math for America. Rob has since built up Cohen Math Prep, a tutoring and test prep company boasting a team of highly qualified tutors with in-depth content knowledge and pedagogical expertise.
Giulia Corona (@trackingexposed) is a communication designer and data analyst. She has been working on a Tracking Exposed's investigation on porn platforms since its beginning, both with data analysis and technical writing. She is also interested in the role of UX and UI in influencing users' decision making processes.
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.
Joel DeCapua is a supervisory special agent in the FBI's Cyber Division. His day job consists of chasing a wide assortment of ransomware affiliates, money launderers, and online scammers. Joel enjoys spending his free time tinkering, researching, and sharing knowledge about network security - and writing terrible code.
Matt Desmarais (@_Matt_the_Maker) is a disabled self-taught maker/hacker. He has been volunteering since 2007 and making things since 2012. He had trouble with a traditional education so he set out to educate himself on a small budget with the skills he thought were necessary for the 21st century and has been enjoying himself ever since.
Cory Doctorow (@doctorow) (craphound.com) is a science fiction author, activist and journalist. He is the author of many books, most recently Radicalized and Walkaway (science fiction for adults), How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism (nonfiction about monopoly and conspiracy), In Real Life (a graphic novel), and the picture book Poesy the Monster Slayer. His latest book is Attack Surface, a standalone adult sequel to Little Brother. His next nonfiction book is Chokepoint Capitalism with Rebecca Giblin, about monopoly and fairness in the creative arts labor market (Beacon Press, 2022). In 2020, he was inducted into the Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame.
Jameson Dungan is a maker/hacker cyborg from Norfolk, Virginia who has a wide range of hobbies and interests ranging from biohacking, urban exploring, leather making, fire and flow arts, radio and RF, to general creative hands-on making. He encourages others to explore and learn with hands-on educational classes at his local makerspace and to take part in the excitement of understanding and learning.
Elonka Dunin (@ElonkaDunin) (elonka.com) is an experienced crypto expert, co-founder and co-leader of a group of cryptographers who are working hard to crack the final cipher on the famous Kryptos sculpture at CIA Headquarters. She maintains a list of the world's most famous unsolved codes on her elonka.com site, and has written multiple books, including The Mammoth Book of Secret Codes and Cryptograms. Bestselling author Dan Brown named one of the characters in his Da Vinci Code sequel, The Lost Symbol, after her. ("Nola Kaye" is an anagrammed form of "Elonka.") She is a member of the board of directors for the National Cryptologic Foundation, and is a lifetime member of the International Game Developers Association. With co-author Klaus Schmeh, she recently published the book Codebreaking: A Practical Guide, as well as an article in the academic journal Cryptologia on hill climbing techniques, entitled, "How We Set New World Records in Breaking Playfair Ciphertexts." In 2021, she gave the TEDx talk, "2,000 Years of Ordinary Secrets."
John Dunlap (MrSynAckster) (@JohnDunlap2) is a vulnerability researcher, security engineer, biohacker, amateur historian, animator, jazz musician, DJ, graphics programmer, mantis farmer, Tetris aficionado, and social engineer. John makes weird machines, weird music, and weird conference talks. John writes demos in the demoscene when he's not doing hacker things.
Manny Faces (@MannyFaces) is an award-winning journalist, podcast producer, entrepreneur, and founding director of nonprofit The Center for Hip-Hop Advocacy. As a podcast professional, Manny produces several acclaimed shows including the award-winning, social justice-meets-Hip-Hop podcast, News Beat, its companion livestream series, This Week In Social Justice, and multimedia interview show, Hip-Hop Can Save America!
Dr. Nathaniel "nwf" Filardo (@qedragon) has been a senior researcher at Microsoft Research since 2020, where he has continued to lead the effort towards heap temporal memory safety enforcement atop CHERI, after his postdoc position in the security group of the University of Cambridge computer laboratory.
Tom "Mr. Icom" Filecco (@Tfilecco) had his first article for 2600 published in 1987. He has appeared in the magazine every few years since then. His latest article, of the same name as his talk, was in the Autumn 2021 issue. He spoke about pagers at the first HOPE conference in 1994. From 1990 to 2021, he edited and published Cybertek Zine: The Cyberpunk Technical Journal. In real life, Tom wrenches on embedded Linux systems during the day, and at night works on his BA in geography.
Joshua Fried (@radiowonderland) is known by many for RADIO WONDERLAND's steering wheel and shoes, others for putting headphones on some of downtown New York City's most mercurial stars of the 1990s and 2000s, and still others for his collaborations with pop stars They Might Be Giants. In the 1980s, he signed to Atlantic Records as a dance music artist. In the 1990s, he became the youngest composer discussed in Schirmer Books' American Music in the 20th Century. His production credits include Chaka Khan, Ofra Haza, and avant drone-master David First. His recordings have been released by free103point9, Trace Label, clang, Tellus, and Atlantic Records.
Dr. Nick Germaine is editor/analyst for Urban Documentation Project, a public interest research organization.
Bill Graydon (@access_ctrl) 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. He's passionate about advancing the security field through research, teaching numerous courses, giving talks, and running the Physical Security (formerly Lock Bypass) Village at various cons. He's received various degrees in computer engineering, security, and forensics and comes from a broad background of work experience in physical and cyber security, anti-money laundering, and infectious disease detection.
Greg (@garlicrouted) is a queer, autistic, antifascist, Appalachian phreak who hasn't left the United States since the Obama administration, and has attended hacker gatherings on and off since Defcon 17. This is his first in-person HOPE. Greg has never been employed by the Central Intelligence Agency (so stop asking).
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 is the founder and artistic director of monochrom, an internationally acting art and theory group and film production company. Boing Boing referred to him as a "leitnerd," a wordplay that ironically hints at his role in nerd/hacker/art culture. His last films were the feature length documentaries Traceroute (2016) and Glossary of Broken Dreams (2018). He's working on two more feature films, including the sci-fi comedy Je Suis Auto and the documentary Hacking at Leaves. 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.
Sammy Hajhamid (@pepsipu) is a blockchain security auditor at OtterSec and is also a CTF player for DiceGang, a U.S.-based CTF team, specializing in binary exploitation. In his free time, he hacks and designs operating systems and embedded software, among other pwn-related things.
Phillip Hallam-Baker is a member of the CERN team that developed the World Wide Web, and is one of the significant contributors of the HTTP/1.0 specification. He has made major contributions to the design and deployment of the WebPKI and has had research appointments at DESY, CERN, MIT LCS, and MIT AI labs. He has served as principal scientist at VeriSign and Comodo.
Kaitlyn Handelman is a security engineer and consultant, defending high-value networks professionally. She has extensive experience in aerospace, radio, and hardware hacking.
Abi Hassen (@abihassen) is a lawyer, hardware hacker, and aspiring political philosopher. He is a partner at O'Neill and Hassen LLP, a law practice focused on indigent criminal defense, and co-founder of Black Movement Law Project, a legal support rapid response group that grew out of the uprisings in Ferguson, Baltimore, and elsewhere. Formerly, he was mass defense coordinator at the National Lawyers Guild. Abi has also worked as a political strategist, union organizer, and community organizer. He is interested in exploring the nature and potentials of movement organizing and the interface of political organizations and social movements with other complex systems such as the law, capitalism, and climate. Abi has a J.D. from NYU School of Law and an M.A. in political philosophy from Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona.
Jim Haugen co-founded the Modest Proposals, a digital performance art collective affiliated with Extinction Rebellion and the Yes Men. He previously organized tech workers and digital protests with Extinction Rebellion to advocate for stronger environmental commitments from tech companies.
Roman Hauksson-Neill (@RomanHauksson) (roman.hn) is a free software advocate, software developer, and computer science student at the University of Texas at Dallas. He's the director of ACM Research (an undergraduate computer science research program) and an officer for OpenUTD (a student organization for Linux and other FOSS). Like some other speakers at HOPE, he's obsessed with Internet privacy, likely to his detriment.
Dr. Frederick L. Hicks is a certified information system VP and certified data privacy and security engineer with 27 years of experience, which includes implementation and management of traditional information security tools, including protective enterprise systems, NIST frameworks, and GDPR. He is an adjunct professor for the University of Colorado in Colorado Springs where he teaches networking and information security. Dr. Hicks is a founding member of Cyberminds Research Institute.
Dr. Tina Honey has over 25 years' experience leading multi-million dollar projects in application development, information security, IT risk management, regulatory compliance, governance, and infrastructure. In the past five years, Dr. Honey has focused on privacy and compliance by conducting security risk assessments and developing reporting frameworks to measure continuous improvement. She is the past president of the ISACA South Florida Chapter, and a founding member of Cyberminds Research Institute.
Lorax B. Horne (@bbhorne) is a non-binary writer and journalist from Canada, Ecuador, and the United Kingdom. They are a former member of DDoSecrets' board of advisors, and currently sit on the board of the DDoSecrets non-profit. They work with researchers on how to make the most of the archive.
Michael Horowitz (@defensivecomput) is a retired computer nerd, having started with IBM mainframes back in the 1970s. (His Twitter ID is not a typo - he wanted @defensivecomputing but it was too long.)
John Huntington (@jhuntington) is a professor of entertainment technology at New York City College of Technology, also known as Citytech, which is part of CUNY. At Citytech, he leads the audio, live video, and networking/control areas and, through his company Zircon Designs, he freelances as an author, entertainment and show control systems consultant, and sound engineer. He is also an award-winning photographer and storm chaser. He has presented talks at every HOPE conference since 2010.
Harri Hursti (@harrihursti) is a Finnish computer programmer and former chairman of the board and co-founder of ROMmon, where he supervised in the development of the world's smallest two-gigabit traffic analysis product that was later acquired by F-Secure Corporation. He is well known for participating in the Black Box Voting hack studies, part of a series of four voting machine hacking tests organized by the nonprofit election watchdog group Black Box Voting in collaboration with the producers of HBO documentary Hacking Democracy (2006). The studies demonstrated serious security flaws in the voting systems of Diebold Election Systems.
Inverse Phase (@inversephase) helps run a computer and game museum (@bloopmuseum) in Maryland. Archiving and preserving as he goes, he also attempts to run a fancy library out of it. He also writes game soundtracks, covers and tributes, and original music on the computers and consoles therein! An active educator in the retro computing scene, Inverse Phase attempts to bring lesser-known and unsung computer and gaming history to light.
Aziz Isham is a filmmaker and producer, and the executive director of Twenty Summers, a nonprofit arts incubator based in Provincetown, MA. Formerly he was the executive producer of BRIC TV. He teaches social justice filmmaking at CUNY's Feirstein Graduate School of Cinema.
Alex Ivanov (FakeRussian) developed an interest in mischief in gaming into a career as a hacker and "information security professional" with multiple absolutely-legitimate degrees and certifications that were completely necessary for career advancement. As a student and participant in the cultural zeitgeist of hacking, they take pleasure in toasting and roasting media portrayals from the accurate to the laughable. Part of making infosec click with the current generation is highlighting real-world relevance to the systems they use every day: tampering is never proprietary.
Harry Jackson (@HarryJ4Justice) is a parent advocate who has over 15 years of federal government experience, is an assistant professor at National Intelligence University, and is an adjunct professor at numerous universities. Harry has been a volunteer in his children's schools for the past decade. He served as a member of the Thomas Jefferson High School PTSA Diversity Committee and established key partnerships and initiatives to improve diversity.
A.J. Jacobs (@ajJacobs) (ajjacobs.com) is an author, journalist, lecturer, and human guinea pig. He has written four New York Times bestsellers that combine memoir, science, humor, and a dash of self-help. He is also editor at large at Esquire Magazine, a commentator on NPR, and a columnist for Mental Floss Magazine. He has appeared on Oprah, The Today Show, Good Morning America, CNN, The Dr. Oz Show, Conan, and The Colbert Report. He has given several TED talks, including ones about living biblically, creating a one-world family, and living healthily. For his latest book, The Puzzler: One Man's Quest to Solve the Most Baffling Puzzles Ever, From Crosswords to Jigsaws to the Meaning of Life, A.J. dived into the world of puzzles, including cryptography and codebreaking.
Travis Johns is the head of VauxFlores, an audio electronics company that specializes in the design and manufacture of unusual sound-making devices. Inspired by a fascination with analog electronics, as well as a good minute spent in the trenches of experimental music, he strives to create devices that tip the hat to the unheralded relics of the past, focusing on the sounds of the underground - whether they be garage rock, tropicalia, space music, swamp blues, harsh-noise, field hollers, non-idiomatic western free-improvisation... and so on.
Dr. Natalie Foster Johnson has 15 years of experience in security, governance, and compliance fields and is an advocate for equality technology, specifically cybersecurity and information security. She is also a member of ISACA South Florida and a founding member of the Cyberminds Research Institute.
Miracle Jones (@instarbooks) is from Texas. He is a very private person.
William Jones is a cybersecurity professional living in New York. His focus is on Microsoft, Google, and Qualcomm products. He has a computer science degree from a research university on the East Coast. He has a commitment to developing novel solutions to pressing problems involving Internet privacy.
Dr. Edvard Joseph is a data privacy and healthcare advocate who believes that everyone should own, control, and determine the way their protected information is processed. Dr. Joseph's research focus is HIPAA compliance, biomedical engineering, global data privacy regulation, risk management, biometric, consumer data protection, patient privacy disclosure and policy compliance specific to the E.U. General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), and HIPAA.
Jamie Joyce (@JustJamieJoyce) is the founding executive director of The Society Library, a non-profit collective intelligence organization dedicated to empowering humanity to make more free and informed choices through knowledge products and cognitive aids. Their works include building databases that articulate the collective reasoning from all points of view on complex issues, teaching students how to critically deconstruct media, bringing "context-checking" to fact-checkers, and building decision-making models for local government. Their methods have been applied to deconstructing and producing legislation, and overall they are dedicated to future generations: working to give them better tools so that more informed, inclusive, and less biased decisions in personal and political matters are possible. Jamie is also an award-winning artist, former social engineer for fun, and maker of plasma poppers and particle accelerator Lichtenberg figures.
Karamoon (@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.
Kody Kinzie @kodykinzie (www.hack.gay) is a security researcher specializing in open-source intelligence and Wi-Fi security. He teaches cybersecurity to millions of beginners on two popular YouTube channels called Hak5 and Null Byte, as well as organizing cybersecurity training and outreach events in Los Angeles. He has presented on security topics at RSA, Chaos Communication Congress, Layer One, and HOPE.
Dr. Lisa J. Knowles is a professor of management in the Gus Machado College of Business at St. Thomas University, Miami Gardens, Florida, where she has been teaching undergraduate and graduate students since 2003. She teaches MBA students organizational behavior, organization design and theory, and qualitative research methods for doctoral students. She is the advisor for STU Caribbean Student Association and participates on various university committees. Her research interests include organizational behavior and human resource management, the recreation marine industry, women studies, entrepreneurship, and international business. Dr. Knowles is a founding member of Cyberminds Research Institute.
Ignat Korchagin (@ignatkn) is a systems engineer at Cloudflare working mostly on platform and hardware security. Ignat's interests are cryptography, hacking, and low-level programming. Before Cloudflare, Ignat worked as a senior security engineer for Samsung Electronics' mobile communications division. His solutions may be found in many older Samsung smart phones and tablets. Ignat started his career as a security researcher in the Ukrainian government's communications services.
Jay Kramer is the managing director of the New York Office of the National Cyber-Forensics and Training Alliance and has served in several leadership roles at the Federal Bureau of Investigation as a special agent and attorney. Jay also served as the director of Cyber Resilience at Bristol Myers Squibb. Jay has responded to hundreds of cybersecurity and data privacy incidents including encryption/ransomware attacks and the loss of PII, PHI, or PCI.
Tom Kranz (@Whoopsie) has over 30 years' experience in cybersecurity, starting with breaking into Prestel with a BBC Micro in the U.K. in the early 1980s. He's now a CISO, published author, and consulting director. Tom has built cybersecurity teams for global companies, consultancies, and government departments, as well as advised executives and company leadership on how to change their hiring process to attract the best, relevant talent.
Andrew Ku (@drookoo) is a cloud platform engineer for the City of New York. He is a native New Yorker born and raised in Queens. You can find him making sure his 3D prints are printing smoothly, staying active by running reds on his folding bike, and editing short vlogs for his future self to watch.
Michelle Lai grew up in Asia, where she developed a strong desire for people to live freely. She believes privacy is one of the most critical ingredients for free societies. As a technophile, she believes technology is a primary tool with which people can achieve privacy and freedom. She was on the inaugural Zcash grant committee (the "ZOMG"), which receives and distributes the lion's share of non-miner block rewards to projects building on top of Zcash, as well as to projects with a strong privacy purpose (e.g. Tor's Rust implementation). In this capacity she authored the ZOMG's whitepaper, describing their grant strategy and vision (zcashomg.org/whitepaper.html).
Kenji Larsen is a technologist who helps companies scale prototype processes and develop components, devices, and software to production levels. Recent activities have been in the fields of robotics, cryogenics, automation, and consumer devices.
Mixæl Swan Laufer (@MichaelSLaufer) of the Four Thieves Vinegar Collective (@4ThievesVinegar) worked in mathematics and high energy physics until he decided to use his background in science to tackle problems of global health and human rights. He continues to work to make it possible for people to manufacture their own medical devices and medications at home by creating access to tools and information.
Irvin Lemus has been in the industry for more than ten years as an MSP technician, consultant, instructor, and coordinator. He is currently the cybersecurity professor at Cabrillo College in Santa Cruz, CA.
Alex Lynd (@alexlynd) (alexlynd.com) is an 18-year-old open-source developer and cybersecurity content creator. He appears on shows such as Hak5 and SecurityFWD, and runs a hardware business called HakCat, where he creates open-source products and educational content that (he hopes) will empower the next generation of makers and hackers. Alex is interested in signals intelligence, microcontrollers, and sustainable design, and enjoys finding ways to fuse computer science with his other hobbies.
MakeItHackin (@MakeItHackin) had his Electronic Article Surveillance (EAS) research start in a physics classroom when learning about Faraday cages. During the 2020 lockdown, he started creating hacker-related content on social media and continues to demonstrate hacker-friendly projects to millions of viewers. He spends his free time creating videos, playing with Arduinos, and designing circuit boards.
Alex Marthews (@rebelcinder) is a U.S.-U.K. dual citizen and father of four living in Massachusetts. He has served as national chair of Restore The Fourth since 2014. His master's degree is in public policy, focusing on discrimination in online blocking and filtering systems. At The Eleventh HOPE, he spoke on "Surveillance Gives Me Chills," and at The Circle of HOPE spoke on a panel titled, "And This Is It? What Went Wrong with Surveillance Reform After Snowden." In his prior career, he was the executive director of nonprofits in the fields of historic preservation, poverty, and girls' education in East Africa.
Andrew Martin has an incisive security engineering ethos gained by building and destroying high-traffic web applications. Proficient in systems development, testing, and operations, he is at his happiest profiling and securing every tier of a cloud native system, and has battle-hardened experience delivering containerized solutions to enterprise and government. He is CEO at control-plane.io.
Freddy Martinez (@twocatsand_docs) is a hacker and transparency activist with extensive experience in public records gained through FOIA and other sunshine laws. He draws on his experience as a Mozilla/Freedom of the Press Foundation fellow, and is the co-founder of Lucy Parsons Labs.
Michael McMahon has been a privacy advocate for years, and currently works as the web developer at the Free Software Foundation (FSF). The Free Software Foundation is a nonprofit with a worldwide mission to promote computer user freedom.
Kunal Mehta (@legoktm) is a volunteer Wikimedia sysadmin and a core developer of the MediaWiki software. He previously worked at the Wikimedia Foundation for about eight years, most recently as part of the Site Reliability Engineering team. Professionally, he works on SecureDrop at the Freedom of the Press Foundation.
Munira Mohamed (@Muniramaidenrue) works as a policy associate for the ACLU of Minnesota, where she assists the legislative department by building relationships with state and local lawmakers, working on the policy agenda, and monitoring key legislation. Her passion is advocacy around poverty and racial equity. In her free time, she loves reading sci-fi novels and figure drawing.
Murph is a long time desktop Linux user, current Linux sysadmin, EFF supporter, long time Fediverse denizen, and long time HOPE attendee.
Dr. Greg Newby (@gbnewby) is an international expert in the use of technology for discovery and understanding, in support of activities and programs for the common good. He has helped to shape digital literature and literacy, high performance computing, data management, information science education, and research software in Canada, the United States, and overseas. He is expert in service design and delivery, including software, systems, support, and infrastructure. His previous HOPE presentations, starting in 2000, have been on a range of topics including hacker ethics, eBooks, and law.
Karen Ng (@hwenab) is a risk analyst at GGR Security, and is one of GGR's entry team for physical penetration tests. She has a strong interest in physical security, delivering trainings on physical security vulnerabilities to a wide range of audiences. Karen comes from a background in engineering and has extensive experience in major event logistics. She is one of the village leads at the Physical Security (formerly Lock Bypass) Village, and works with the rest of the LBV team to teach how to recognize and fix security exploits to the community. Graphic design is her passion.
Yoshinari Nishiki (@inariwishiki) is an artist/researcher based in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. In his mid-20s, he figured out how he can survive for the rest of his life: exchanging one yellow banana for two green bananas in front of a supermarket. The newly invented job Banana Multiplier was presented as part of the "Time & Motion: Redefining Working Life" exhibition at FACT Liverpool in 2013. After relocating to Rotterdam, his focus shifted more towards modes of moving things, having conducted experiments such as free transport by crowd, moving a mountain of agricultural produce with food couriers, and single-handedly flipping a 20-foot container.
Obi O'Brien received her qualification to teach mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) from Brown University's School of Public Health. She facilitates an open community of mindfulness practitioners and academic researchers at the Mindfulness Lab and is completing her registered yoga teacher training through the Yoga Alliance. Obi co-developed one of the first smart contract oracle services on the Bitcoin blockchain in 2013 and went on to lead product development for Ernst and Young's Digital Asset Group. Obi continues to develop technological tools and uses her mindfulness training to ask better questions about the technology that she is developing in her capacity as founder at Lenox Group.
Cybelle Oliveira (@cyb3113) is a senior cybersecurity analyst at Tempest Security Intelligence. She is part of the Mozilla community, ambassador and curator of the Mozilla Festival, and director of the Brazilian organization Casa Hacker.
Tarek Omar leads Senet Software, a software consultancy and game development studio that was born inside Cairo Hackerspace. With Senet Software, Tarek has built and helped design eight of the most popular fourth generation escape rooms in New York City. He has worked on Senet Lab, a state of the art online solution for remote work and remote education. In the past, he has provided IoT solutions for environmental, agricultural, and "smart cities" projects, acted as team lead on numerous software projects, launched and managed Cairo Hackerspace and mobile makerspace Maker Express in Egypt, taught interdisciplinary creative tech workshops, and coached parkour for more than ten years.
Isaac Overcast (@isaacovercast) is a computational biologist interested in unifying models of ecological and evolutionary processes to better understand how biodiversity is generated and maintained. From 2019 to 2021 he was a postdoctoral researcher in the Morlon group at Institut de Biologie de l'Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris, where he developed theory and models of island biodiversity genomics, in association with the EU funded iBioGen project. Isaac is currently a postdoc in the EcoEvoMatics lab at the University of Maine working on the Rules of Life Engine (the RoLE model), a continuation of his theoretical unification approach.
Xavier Palmer is a hobbyist and recent biomedical engineering graduate from Old Dominion University. He likes to contribute to projects that promote literacy in STEM and is passionate about emerging biomedical technologies.
Geva Patz is a co-founder of The Emergence Project, a public-benefit organization aimed at catalyzing transformative change through technology. Geva's extensive experience in the technology field includes artificial intelligence, virtual reality, networks and Internet, and novel hardware design. Beyond the confines of technology, he is also responsible for a number of works in the areas of film, interactive installations, and pyrotechnic art.
Josh Patrick "Peon" Paulton (@vicastudio) is a registered clinical counselor with the British Columbia Association of Clinical Counselors in Canada. He works in mental health, and his research focuses are mindfulness meditation, gastrointestinal diseases, and consciousness. Josh is also a clinical hypnotist. He combines his experience working professionally with advanced mind/body practical knowledge to teach how the human mind operates and how to exploit it. Josh is a magician, and one day will rule earth.
Sam Peinado co-founded the Modest Proposals, a digital performance art collective affiliated with Extinction Rebellion and the Yes Men. He spent four years as a product designer in cloud infrastructure before joining the climate fight full-time, building APIs for greener electricity markets.
Dr. Alexis Perdereaux-Weekes is a data privacy champion who believes that everyone should own, control, and determine the way their protected information is processed. He is a former president of the executive leadership for the ISACA South Florida chapter, and member of the technology and innovation steering committee of the National Association of Health Services Executives (NAHSE) South Florida.
Alessandro Polidoro (@trackingexposed) is an Italian attorney-at-law and the legal lead of Tracking Exposed, experienced in digital forensics and data protection law. Working closely with many hacktivist and civil society groups, Alessandro has always been passionate in advocating for digital rights.
Steven Presser (@spresser) is a tinkerer of many things software and has been writing code since his early teens. He was first drawn to hacking by watching a peer perform an SQL injection on one of his first large projects at age 14. Later, Steve received his Bachelors in computer science from Johns Hopkins University and has since worked for Microsoft, Cray, and HPE. He is currently a researcher at HLRS in Stuttgart, Germany. He has also served as an expert witness and written proof-of-concept code for a brief to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Jesselyn Radack (@JesselynRadack) is an award-winning human rights lawyer, author, former whistleblower, and national security and human rights director of the Whistleblower and Source Protection Program (WHISPeR) at ExposeFacts. She has defended numerous journalists, whistleblowers, and hacktivists, including Thomas Drake, Edward Snowden, and Daniel Hale, and is author of TRAITOR: The Whistleblower and the "American Taliban."
Javair Ratliff is a co-founder of The Emergence Project, a public-benefit organization aimed at catalyzing transformative change through technology. Javair is a 22-year-old technology hacker, particularly interested in using technology to help improve mindfulness and extend our individual creative capabilities. Having done a wide variety of professional work in various fields from messaging, public health, and interactive AR/VR experiences, he has developed a wide sense of the possibilities of technology and the limits of developing it within the current system.
Michael Ravnitzky is an attorney and former journalist who has 25 years of experience in using the Freedom of Information Act and state public records laws.
Lane Rettig (@lrettig) is a former Ethereum core developer and does core (layer one) blockchain R&D for Spacemesh (www.spacemesh.io). He has a background in privacy, security, and cryptography.
Brandon Roberts (@bxroberts) is an independent data journalist with a focus on open source software development and applying computational techniques to local watchdog journalism. He has worked with news organizations large and small, including ProPublica, the Associated Press, Oregon Public Broadcasting and The Seattle Times. You can follow him at: bxroberts.org.
rolltime (@rolltimeonbird), @rolltime@freeradical.zone) is an undergraduate CS student, hacker/maker, and DJ from Houston, Texas. Her interests include bartending, proselytizing for free software, and making computers serve humans instead of the other way around. She also goes by ce92621877b77b35adbab34b3ceeb2dc.
Lucas Rooyakkers is a software engineer at a satellite company, coming from a background in the military with a degree in physics. He has a keen interest in the interface between physical and cyber security, and how SDRs can be used to violate many assumptions about wireless security systems. Lucas has written software for several low earth orbit satellites whizzing above your head every two hours in space, and Lucas speaks Esperanto.
Ed Ryan is a New York intellectual property attorney specializing in patents with a background in physics. Ed's practice deals heavily with machine learning technologies.
George Sandford leads the Gigamon Technical Success (TSM) team with more than 20 years of experience helping clients solve their IT and security challenges through firsthand engagement, leading exceptional teams, and focusing on customer success. He is a passionate advocate for expanding diversity and building a more inclusive and positive security community.
Klaus Schmeh (@KlausSchmeh) (schmeh.org) is the most-published cryptology author in the world. He has written 15 books (in German) about the subject, as well as over 250 articles, 25 scientific papers, and 1500 blog posts. Klaus's main fields of interest are codebreaking and the history of encryption. His blog Cipherbrain is read by crypto enthusiasts all over the world. Klaus is a popular speaker, known for his entertaining presentation style involving self-drawn cartoons and Lego models. He has lectured at hundreds of conferences, including the NSA Cryptologic History Symposium, HistoCrypt, the Charlotte International Cryptologic Symposium, and the RSA Conference in San Francisco. In his day job, Klaus works for an IT security company. With co-author Elonka Dunin, he recently published the book Codebreaking: A Practical Guide, as well as an article in the academic journal Cryptologia on hill climbing techniques, entitled, "How We Set New World Records in Breaking Playfair Ciphertexts."
Gabe Schuyler (@gabe_sky) is a constant tinkerer with a penchant for rabbit holes. By day, Gabe is a cloud security specialist at Wiz, Inc. Prior to that, he's worked at PuppetLabs and Sony Playstation. (He's in the credits of over 20 video games!) Gabe's been in operations for so long, he had a two-digit Internic handle and knows how to terminate a SCSI bus.
Jason Scott is the founder of textfiles.com, the Free Range Archivist of the Internet Archive (Wayback Machine, archive.org), and the Rounding Error of the calculus of worthiness to the Underground.
Davide Semenzin (@lluvt) develops and maintains the Internet Archive books digitization systems and scan centers, from the book scanning software to the backend services, scan center deployment, and automation. He studied computer science in Italy and got his MSc from Utrecht University in 2013. He co-founded and ran a cloud computing business in roles ranging from services and network engineering to dev ops and orchestration. An avid Borges reader, Davide has been interested in libraries long before joining the Archive: notably, he's been involved in digital humanities and digital libraries through the Berkeley Prosopography Services project at UC Berkeley since 2012 as a core developer. When his free time doesn't look like work (computers and books), he likes to fly airplanes, fly on airplanes, and play with lasers.
Carey Shenkman (@CareyShenkman) is a human rights lawyer, litigator, and co-author of a forthcoming volume on the panoramic history of the Espionage Act and CFAA: A Century of Repression: The Espionage Act and Freedom of the Press. He serves on the board of the Calyx Institute, and has worked on numerous topics at the intersection of civil rights and technology, including blockchains, artificial intelligence, data brokers, and encryption.
Sidepocket (@defcon201nj) is a co-founder of DCG 201, an open group for hacker workshop projects in northeast New Jersey, overly motivated to help people get better at whatever they want to do and learn. He also has a history with NYC 2600, Radio Statler at Hackers on Planet Earth, Phone Losers of America, TOOOL, Museum of Urban Reclaim Spaces, and The Yes Men.
David Sidi is trying to think about privacy in new ways while researching, developing, and applying information technologies for privacy and security. In addition to measurement botnets, his other current projects focus on anonymity and planning for future security with Colombian news organizations.
Aditya K Sood (PhD) (@adityaksood) is a cybersecurity advisor, practitioner, researcher, and consultant. Dr. Sood obtained his PhD from Michigan State University in computer sciences. Dr. Sood is also an author of Targeted Cyber Attacks and Empirical Cloud Security books. He works as senior director of threat research and security strategy at the Office of the CTO at F5.
SquareMatrix (@TheSquareMatrix) is a hacker and underground artist from San Francisco. He is passionate about electronics, transmedia storytelling, and perpetuating hoaxes.
Emma Stamm, PhD (@14floating) is Visiting Assistant Professor at Villanova University, where she teaches at the intersection of philosophy and STS. Her research draws on the traditions of critical theory and continental philosophy to address the political and epistemic implications of ubiquitous data production. She maintains ongoing interests in psychedelic drug research and artificial intelligence. Her website is www.o-culus.com.
Elior Sterling (@eliorsterling) has experience as an immigrant and as a foreign worker in several countries. He has also volunteered for over three decades with organizations that help refugees and asylum seekers.
Robert Stribley (@stribs) has over 20 years of experience as a user experience designer, and is a creative director focusing on experience design at Publicis Groupe. He has written and presented extensively on the topics of user experience design and online privacy. He also teaches user experience design at the School of Visual Arts.
Adam Tannir tells stories to computers, currently focusing on robotics, computer vision, and neural networks. He is a founding member of FUBAR Labs, New Jersey's oldest hackerspace. He still believes that "the mind is a fire to be kindled," but tries to be more concise nowadays.
Tas (@tas_kmanager) is a community-oriented person who just happens to work and play in the cyber security field. He spent years of his life working corporately within different verticals ranging from healthcare all the way to tech giants, where he is now. He loves doing research in detection engineering and threat hunting, where he managed to find some cool stuff in endpoint, network, and cloud. He loves open source projects and collaboration, which is why he joins a lot of collective movements such as CDEF.ID, an Indonesian cyber security community and theDFIRreport, a researcher collective sharing threat reports free for the public. Outside of all these keyboard actions, he loves to cook, play music, and do astrophotography.
Jeanne Thornton (@instarbooks) is an American writer and co-publisher of Instar Books. She is most recently the author of the novel Summer Fun, now available from Soho Press. She has received the Judith A. Markowitz Award for Emerging LGBTQ Writers. Anthologies to which she has contributed to have won a Lambda Literary Award and a Barbara Gittings Literature Award. Works she has written and edited have been finalists for Lambda Literary Awards for Debut Fiction, Transgender Fiction, and Graphic Novel.
Ying Tong is a core engineer working on the Zcash project. She builds zero-knowledge circuits and proving systems for private currency, virtual machines, and other applications. She looks forward to a world where private and verifiably correct communication is the norm.
TProphet has visited over 70 countries and territories across all seven continents, mostly through travel hacks using miles and points. Celebrating his 30th anniversary as a 2600: The Hacker Quarterly writer, he has dispatched the "Telecom Informer" column from all over the world. TProphet also writes the Seat 31B travel blog.
Alexander Urbelis is senior counsel for cybersecurity with Crowell LLP. Bridging the gap between legal and technical expertise, Alex is also the architect of an award-winning cyber threat intelligence platform designed to identify hallmarks of impending cyberattacks, cybersquatting, counterfeiting, and other malicious activities. Making international news in March 2020, Alex detected and helped to neutralize a state-sponsored intrusion attempt on the World Health Organization. For this and his additional work with DHS to identify pandemic-related fraud and misinformation, Alex was selected as a finalist for the Financial Times' Innovative Lawyers Awards in 2020. His published works can be found within the Financial Times, CNN, the Philadelphia Inquirer, The Intercept, and 2600. Alex is a member of the technology advisory board of Human Rights First, the UL Security Council, the Uniform Law Commission Committee for the Study of Cybercrime, the Society of Professional Investigators, and you undoubtedly know him from Off The Hook.
Vitor Ventura is a Cisco Talos security researcher and manager of the EMEA and Asia Outreach team. As a researcher, he investigated and published various articles on emerging threats. Most of the day Vitor is hunting for threats, reversing code but also looking for the geopolitical and/or economic context that better suits them. Vitor worked as IBM X-Force IRIS European manager where he was lead responder on several high profile organizations affected by the WannaCry and NotPetya infections. Before that he did penetration testing at IBM X-Force Red, where Vitor led flagship projects like Connected Car assessments and ICS security assessments, custom mobile devices among other IoT security projects. Vitor holds a Bsc in computer science and multiple security related certifications.
André Vianna (@andreeevianna) has worked for more than ten years in cybersecurity. He is leading the detection engineering team supporting UDLC (Use Development Life Cycle) at Tempest Security Intelligence.
Vlado Vince (@mejs), (@mejs@mastodon.social) is a technologist with an interest in the history of computing and networks, with a focus on non-Western countries before the end of the Cold War. He posts about his research on Twitter and Mastodon.
Chris Weiland (@rt4mn) is a freelance nerd and the co-chair of Restore the Fourth Minnesota. He wears his tinfoil hat with pride, and does not like sharing personal information about himself.
Kyle Wiens (@kwiens) is the CEO of iFixit, the free repair manual. He's dedicated his life to defeating the second law of thermodynamics, a battle fought in the courtroom as often as in the workshop. Kyle led the international coalition that established repair as a cornerstone of the circular economy and got the Right to Repair law passed in New York.
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. He's currently building Quiet, a local-first, peer-to-peer team chat app.
Xio (@XioNYC) is a long-time institution of NYC2600 and has accumulated decades of knowledge of the communication arts, from pre-production to finished product. A three-time HOPE conference lecturer, he passes along his wisdom for hacking, accessibility, philosophy, and getting by on minimal budgets. 12h 24m 09.927(9) -40°41'29.7(3)
Sophie Zhang became a whistleblower after spending two years and eight months at Facebook failing to fix the company from within. She personally caught two national governments using Facebook to manipulate their own citizenry, while also revealing concerning decisions made by Facebook regarding inauthenticity in Indian and U.S. politics. Formerly a data scientist, she currently stays home to pet her cats.
Yan Zhu has been the chief information security officer at Brave Software, creators of Brave Browser, since 2015. Prior to Brave, Yan was a senior security engineer at Yahoo, working on end-to-end email encryption, and a staff technologist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, where she worked on open source projects such as HTTPS Everywhere and Let's Encrypt. She has also served on the W3C Technical Architecture Group and DEF CON talks review board.