aestetix served on the Oakland Domain Awareness Center ad hoc privacy committee as a technical expert. In addition, he has been involved in many privacy-aware projects, including Noisetor, the first nonprofit sponsored Tor exit node in the United States, and The Last HOPE and The Next HOPE badges, which involved RFID location-aware social networking. He also refuses to eat hot dog buns on Sundays, in accordance with the wishes of Our Goddess.
Salman Aljammaz is a programmer and occasional unicyclist. He's one of the developers of Camlistore, the content-addressed storage system on which The Code Archive runs.
Nina Alli is a biohacker working in health care analytics and business intelligence who practices alchemy.
Mitch Altman is a San Francisco-based hacker and inventor, best known for inventing TV-B-Gone remote controls, a keychain that turns off TVs in public places. He was also cofounder of 3ware, a successful Silicon Valley startup in the late 1990s, and did pioneering work in virtual reality in the mid-1980s. He has contributed to Make Magazine and other magazines, and wrote a chapter for Maker Pro, a book about making a living from projects one loves. For the last several years, Mitch has been giving talks and leading workshops around the world, teaching people to make cool things with microcontrollers, and teaching everyone to solder. He promotes hackerspaces and open-source hardware, and mentors others wherever he goes. He is a cofounder of the Noisebridge hackerspace in San Francisco, and is president and CEO of Cornfield Electronics.
Gillian "Gus" Andrews has been a senior usability research fellow at Simply Secure, continuing work she did on security usability at the Open Internet Tools Project. Her doctorate at Teachers College explored user misunderstandings of search. She has helped organize the HOPE conference since 2008, and has been a panelist on Off The Hook. She produces The Media Show, a series about media and digital literacy which has been featured on Boing Boing, the EFF blog, and Slashdot.
asn is a Tor developer and designer of high tech systems.
Sean Auriti has skills in web development, engineering, and technical leadership. He graduated from NYIT with a BS in electronic engineering technology and has since worked as a CTO and lead developer at several web development and technology firms in New York City. He has won over 11 hackathons, including NYC BigApps and the BSR sustainability app. Sean has also founded, managed, and built infrastructure for the Alpha One Labs hackerspace, at which he has built prototypes for an LCD hat, laser scrolling sign, electronic game, 3D POV holographic display, robotic chef, smart recycle bin, and robotic food exchange. He was on the front page of The New York Times for a space group he was a part of that received DARPA funding.
Roni Bandini was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina and is a writer, journalist, and coder.
Zimmer Barnes served as hacker-in-residence at Tsinghua University in Beijing for six months, and went on to cofound Beijing's first feminist makerspace, Q Space. His previous projects include a wearable solar generator, a hydroponic system that cleans the air, his own recipe of chewing gum that makes you smarter, and segmented Kevlar rescue armor.
Burcu Baykurt is a doctoral student at Columbia University whose research interests are in the intersection of cultural sociology, urban policy, and media studies. Her dissertation examines the smart city experiments in U.S. cities, and how they are affecting civic culture, local politics, and urban inequality. Before coming to Columbia, she studied political communications at Goldsmiths, University of London and completed her MA in media, culture, and communication at New York University.
Beaches has been attending HOPE since HOPE Number Nine (2012). He has also been involved with Radio Statler since then.
Edward K. Beale is a retired U.S. Coast Guard O5, HH-65 helicopter aircraft commander, amateur radio technician (KC2GRD), author of West By Sea, regular stage speaker for eLearning Guild and numerous regional conferences, four-time expedition leader of helicopter support for polar ocean operations, and world traveler (Order of Magellan).
Charles Beckwith is a freelance executive and consultant, using his unique horizontal experience in fashion, media, and technology to help fashion and fashion-tech brands solve problems and build future-ready solutions. He is concurrently chief exploration officer at Open Source Fashion, and CEO of the Fashion Media Center think tank and marketing lab, where he is producer and co-host of the fashion industry's favorite show, American Fashion Podcast. A veteran media producer and artist with experience across radio, television, filmmaking, publishing, photography, theater, technology development, fiction writing, and live events management, he paints in his spare time.
Nora Benson is a designer, maker, artist, and ex-UIUC engineering/industrial design/economics student now finishing up a custom degree in Digital Design and Making at The New School/Parsons. She is passionate about 3D printing and modeling, web design, branding, making, using design for social change, education, the future of work, Virtual Reality, printmaking, and travel, and has a special passion for Taiwan, where she spent a year studying Chinese through the National Security Language Initiative Program. She has enjoyed doing projects at FabLabs in Champaign, Chicago, and San Francisco and is super excited to be presenting at The Eleventh HOPE!
Matt Blaze is a hacker and professor in the computer science department at the University of Pennsylvania. He's spoken at HOPE almost every time (he missed the second), and has testified before Congress on the issues presented in his HOPE talk this year.
Sam Bowne has been teaching security classes at City College in San Francisco since 2000. He has a PhD, a CISSP, and a lot of t-shirts.
Adam Brand has more than 12 years of experience in information technology and security. He is a director with Protiviti, where he has assisted companies in resolving major security incidents and maturing their information security programs. Adam has been heavily involved with the "I Am the Cavalry" movement, a group of researchers focused on information security issues that can affect human life and safety. He has recently focused on medical device security and is actively engaging with health care organizations on this issue.
Vivian Brown is a software engineer on EFF's web development team. She maintains eff.org and builds campaign sites and internal tools for EFF. Before joining EFF, Vivian was part of a worker co-op that provided web development and design services to social change organizations. Some of her other past projects include applying machine learning to birdsong and mapping Oakland campaign finance data.
William Budington is a security/software engineer at the EFF, where he works on Panopticlick, Open Democracy Tools, and other technology projects. As a crypto-enthusiast, he has contributed to many cryptography software projects such as SecureDrop and Let's Encrypt. He loves hackerspaces and getting together with other techies to tinker, code, share, and build the technological commons.
Bunni3burn is a homegrown Midwesterner hailing from a cornfield in Illinois, but ran away to a real city. She rarely sleeps, hardly leaves the house, and often forgets to eat. She enjoys pixel art, social engineering, and collecting bouncy balls. In kindergarten, Bunni3 played Ms. Pacman on a computer... and that's all it took. She fell in love with technology. Bunni3 has been around since the birth of Radio Statler at The Last Hope in 2008. She spent three years as the program director/producer. Now Bunni3 hangs around Radio Statler so she can take over the microphone after midnight.
Chris Burke has been creating peculiar media centered around games and game culture for 15 years, including the award-winning machinima talk show This Spartan Life and multiple chip music releases for 8bitpeoples, Astralwerks, and other labels under the name glomag. "Songs From The Robot Apocalypse" is his most recent project, expected to hit the stage later in the year.
Ebrahim Bushehri is the founder and CEO of the field-programmable RF chip company Lime Micro. He is also the founder of the nonprofit initiative MyriadRF, which seeks to bring open-source RF hardware to a wider audience through the development of low-cost, professional-grade hardware. Ebrahim's experience spans over 25 years in directing and managing of design teams for the implementation of high performance ICs within the wireless communication market. He has worked with organizations such as Nokia, Qinetiq (formerly Defence Evaluation Research Agency), and Fraunhofer IAF. Ebrahim is a member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE).
Matt Cagle is a technology and civil liberties policy attorney at the ACLU of Northern California, where he focuses on privacy, government surveillance, and free speech issues related to technologies used by businesses and governments. At the ACLU, Matt works on legislation affecting technology policy, promotes startup best practices, and collaborates with the litigation team. Prior to joining the ACLU as a policy attorney, Matt was an associate with BlurryEdge Strategies, a legal and business consulting practice providing legal advice to startups on products including connected devices, social networking platforms, and search services. With BlurryEdge, Matt worked extensively with companies fighting demands for user information and the removal of content, and he has authored multiple transparency reports. Matt is originally from Arizona, graduated summa cum laude with honors from the University of Arizona, and attended Stanford Law School.
Andrew Cantino is a software engineer who has worked at Google, Pivotal, and Mavenlink. In addition to cofounding BeeLine Reader, Andrew is also the creator of Huginn, an open-source workflow and integration engine that has more than 100 contributors and more than 13,000 stars on GitHub.
Senior Technologist / Engineer, Information Security Professional, Entrepreneur and the founder of BinaryMist Ltd, OWASP NZ Chapter Leader, Certified Scrum Master, Facilitator, mentor and motivator of cross functional, self-managing teams. With a solid 15 years of commercial industry experience, Kim Carter Enjoys teaching others how to apply information security to their Agile processes, bringing the security focus up front where it's the cheapest to implement, increasing profit and reducing costs. International trainer, speaker and published author, focusing on 0) Software and network architecture 1) Web development / engineering 2) Information security.
Ryan Castellucci has co-authored two papers about cryptographic attacks on Bitcoin and given talks on cracking brainwallets. For his day job at White Ops, he finds new and exciting ways to tease out the subtle differences between bots and human-controlled web browsers.
Austin Chan is currently a 3rd-year graduate student in Industrial Design at University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, also working as teaching assistant (TA) in CAD and sketching courses. He is a designer with international experiences working for companies in both Asia and the US. As a Student Expert of Autodesk Fusion 360 program, Austin is keen on sharing his experience in 3D modeling and exploring the future of industrial design.
Kevin Chen is a biochemist and biohacker. He is a cofounder of Montreal's DIYbio community, Bricobio. When he's not working on the hacker/maker scene, he is working as the CEO and cofounder of Hyasynth Bio, a biotech startup that is producing cannabinoids using genetically engineered yeast.
The Cheshire Catalyst (Richard Cheshire) is the former publisher of the notorious TAP Newsletter of the radical 1970s and 80s. He has also attended (and volunteered at) every HOPE conference we've ever held. While available for speaking engagements, he is currently retired in Florida where he has his very own area code.
Ming Chow is a senior lecturer at the Tufts University Department of Computer Science. His areas of work are in web and mobile engineering and web security. He was a web application developer for ten years at Harvard University. Ming has spoken at numerous organizations and conferences.
Sandy Clark is a hacker and PhD candidate at the University of Pennsylvania. She studies the vulnerability life cycle, security vulnerabilities, and other interesting things.
Sebastian S. Cocioba is an independent plant biology researcher for the education-oriented biotech non-profit, Binomica Labs. His work focuses on developing open source biological tools and curricula which allow students of all ages and economic backgrounds to conduct small, thoughtful science in a manner that makes research and education indistinguishable from each other. By giving students the tools and resources to pursue their own curiosities in a structured manner, the results of their time spent will be of scientific merit beyond the classroom and allow them to actively contribute to the global scientific conversation that affects us all.
Gabriella "Biella" Coleman holds the Wolfe Chair in scientific and technological literacy at McGill University. Trained as an anthropologist, her scholarship explores the intersection of the cultures of hacking and politics, with a focus on the sociopolitical implications of the free software movement and the digital protest ensemble Anonymous. She has authored two books, Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking and Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy: The Many Faces of Anonymous, which was named to Kirkus Reviews' Best Books of 2014 and was awarded the 2015 Diana Forsythe Prize by the American Anthropological Association.
Naomi Colvin is a campaigner for the Courage Foundation, an international organization that supports individuals who risk life or liberty to make significant contributions to the historical record.
James Cropcho has been building software applications - and companies around those applications - for over a decade. He is the creator of the MongoDB schema analyzer Variety, which was featured on the official MongoDB blog in 2012. He was a member of the two-person team which uncovered the first wide-scale breach of the secret ballot in American history, and has been featured on National Public Radio and BBC News. Last spring, James designed and taught the graduate course "Web Development with Open Data" at New York University's Interactive Telecommunications Program.
Comet Crowbar is a queer white cis-lady, a self-published author and zinester, cofounder of the Zine Fest Berlin, anti-imperialist, a member/organizer of the Uhuru Solidarity Movement, and a teacher at a DIY makerspace for kids called Parts and Crafts. She lives in so-called Cambridge, Massachusetts and runs a zine distro: Raumschiff Distro and Press.
Cindy Cullen has over 20 years of experience leading cybersecurity and information risk programs. Cindy is president of the New Jersey chapter of (ISC)2, is an ICIT fellow advising congress and staff on cybersecurity issues, and is chief cybersecurity strategist at HPE. Previously, she was CISO at Telcordia/Bellcore, vice president of IS at Citi, CTO at SAFE BioPharma, and designed an S-SDLC process for Bristol Myers Squibb. She served on the Bridgewater-Raritan Regional School Board for nine years, including as vice president and president.
DarkSim905 is founder of TOOOL New Jersey and has experience in instructing individuals on lockpicking, increasing their physical and virtual security posture. His particular interest is in bypass techniques and augmenting 3D designs to assist in generating keys for high security systems. Professionally, he is a sysadmin and Infosec goon. Curator of the #TSAkeys hashtag and living timeline, when not roaming the conference he can be found at the TOOOL lockpick village.
Benjamin Dean is a fellow for cyber-security and Internet governance at Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA). An economist by training, his research focuses on the economics of information, privacy, and data security. Benjamin worked on technology policy for three years in Paris, France, at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). An Australian national, he has lived and worked in China, India, Bhutan, France, Venezuela, and the United States.
Molly de Blanc is interested in the intersections between society and technology, especially from the perspectives of ethics, community engagement, and practical implementation. At work, she is the community coordinator for the Open edX project at edX, and in her free time she is a free and open-source technology activist, Open Source Initiative board member, caretaker of plants and a cat, and rock star.
David Décary-Hétu earned his PhD in criminology from the University of Montreal in 2013. He has since worked and taught at the School of Criminal Sciences in Lausanne and the Polytechnique Engineering school of Montreal and is now an assistant professor at the School of Criminology of the University of Montreal. His main research interests are online illicit markets, especially those hosted on the darknet. The results of his research, funded by both the provincial and federal governments in Canada, have been published in major journals, have been presented at numerous conferences, and have been disseminated to a wide audience in a number of interviews with the media.
Fabrício do Canto is a "mate hacker" at metamate.cc and was an active member of the Pirate Party in Pankow, Berlin. He spent ten years on sabbatical traveling the globe with family realizing art and digital inclusion projects, mostly in India and other remote areas like Amazonia.
The Doctor is a security practitioner working for a currency remittance and financial software company on the West Coast. When not reading hex dumps, auditing code, writing bots to monitor critical business processes, or trying to break into his own networks from outside, he assists his local community however he can in making the world a better place, travels through time and space inside a funny blue box, contributes designs and code to a number of open-source hardware and software projects, and presents around the Bay Area on a number of technical topics. Exocortex, a software ecosystem for augmenting one's cognitive capabilities by farming out repetitive and tedious tasks that are still personally relevant, has been his skunkworks project for nearly 20 years and is now at the point where it should be usable by others.
Cory Doctorow (craphound.com) is a science fiction novelist, blogger, and technology activist. He is the co-editor of the popular weblog Boing Boing (boingboing.net), and a contributor to The Guardian, Publishers Weekly, Wired, and many other newspapers, magazines, and websites. (He even wrote an article for 2600 under a different name many years ago!) He is a special consultant to the Electronic Frontier Foundation (eff.org), you know, those superheroes who defend freedom in cyberspace on a daily basis. His two latest books are In Real Life, a young adult graphic novel created with Jen Wang (2014); and Information Doesn't Want to Be Free, a business book about creativity in the Internet age (2014). His latest young adult novel is Homeland, the best-selling sequel to 2008's wildly popular Little Brother. His latest novel for adults is Rapture of the Nerds, written with Charles Stross and published in 2012. His latest short story collection is With a Little Help, available in paperback, ebook, audiobook, and limited edition hardcover.
dr_dave is currently a PhD candidate at Rutgers Business School - Newark. He holds a BS in comp info sys from ASU, an MS in infotech from Rutgers, an MS in comp sci from NJIT, and is currently attempting to grind through a PhD in management science/infosys from Rutgers. He enjoys biking, long walks on the beach, and contemplating the finer points of everything the realms of cyber and information security have to offer.
Ben Dubin-Thaler created the BioBus in 2007 to test his hypothesis that if people felt the excitement of scientific discovery, they would become more excited about doing science and becoming a scientist. This hypothesis has since been validated with 165,000 students from 500 schools boarding the BioBus and exhibiting dramatic positive changes in attitudes towards science and science careers. "Dr. Ben's" philosophy of providing hands-on, inquiry-based research lab experiences guides him as executive director of the nonprofit Cell Motion Laboratories, whose continuing mission is to create a future in which all people know the joy of scientific discovery through the construction of laboratory environments in which scientists join students for hands-on explorations of the natural world. Ben and his team recently created the BioBus Base, or "BioBase", a new community laboratory in Manhattan that is empowering, accessible, unintimidating, and facilitates in-depth scientific engagement even amongst populations historically underrepresented in science professions. He created the BioBus after completing his BA in physics and mathematics, as well as his PhD in biology from Columbia University. The author of numerous high-profile research articles and book chapters in cell biology and biophysics, Dr. Ben has lectured at the American Society for Cell Biology, the National Institutes of Health, Rockefeller University, New York University, the University of Illinois, PopTech, TEDxWoodsHole, and the Materials Research Society, receiving numerous awards and accolades for excellence in research and teaching.
Jameson Dungan is a self-taught biohacker and founder of Biologik Labs in Norfolk, Virginia. He is passionate about maker/hacker culture, urban exploring, and cyberpunk art. While democratizing science and teaching biology, he is also a supporter of open-source hardware and learning by doing.
Gil Elliot: "I've been an amateur radio operator since 2009 and hold an Extra class license and am also an ARRL Volunteer Examiner. I operate a modest base station out of my apartment in Brooklyn and work mostly HF digital modes from there, and operate mobile VHF while traveling. I've been a reader of 2600 since the 1980s and this will be my second HOPE. My professional background is in IT project management for system implementations and migrations, and I have a strong interest in information security and malware analysis."
Scott Erven is an associate director at Protiviti. He has over 15 years of information security and information technology experience with subject matter expertise in medical device and health care security. Scott has advised the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, Food and Drug Administration, and national policymakers. His research on medical device security has been featured in Wired, Forbes, BBC, and numerous media outlets worldwide. He has presented his research and expertise in the field internationally. His current focus is on research that affects human life and public safety issues inside today's health care landscape.
Eric Evenchick has worked at several automotive companies and is the creator of the CANtact CAN bus sniffer.
Mark Fahey lives in Sydney, Australia and is a biomedical informatics specialist who develops acute-care clinical solutions. His other current projects include Behind the Curtain, a multimedia and print analysis of North Korean propaganda and mind control techniques; Satdirectory, a free-to-air satellite directory; and MediaExplorer, a virtual travel guide to free-to-air digital satellite reception of information about remote lands and intriguing cultures.
Nima Fatemi is an Iranian independent security researcher, focused on encryption, anonymity, privacy, and censorship circumvention technologies. He is a core member of The Tor Project and the chief technologist of Library Freedom Project.
Janon Fisher is an editor at DNAinfo.com.
Kate Forscey joined Public Knowledge as an Internet Rights Fellow in April 2014, and transitioned to her role as Associate Counsel for Government Affairs in April 2015. Kate advocates for the public interest on Internet and technology policy and government affairs, including net neutrality, video and broadband competition, spectrum policy, and other issues crucial to preserving an open Internet and consumer digital rights. Prior to joining PK, Kate worked on Internet and technology issues for the Open Internet Coalition as a summer associate for Holch and Erickson, focusing primarily on the FCC's 2010 open Internet proceeding. Kate received her JD from Vanderbilt University Law School in 2012 and holds a BA in psychology with a focus in psychobiology from the University of Virginia College of Arts and Sciences.
Camille Francoise is a fellow at Harvard Law School's Berkman Center for Internet and Society, and at the Yale Law School Information Society Project. A Fulbright fellow, she is also a visiting scholar at Columbia University's Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies, where she consulted for the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) on cybersecurity.
Bob Frankston was born in Brooklyn, New York, graduated from MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts with degrees in computer science and electrical engineering, and is on the Board of Governors and is a Distinguished Lecturer for the IEEE Consumer Electronics Society. He has been online since 1966, was co-developer of the first electronic spreadsheet (VisiCalc), and has been honored by the IEEE for his contributions to home networking while at Microsoft. At Microsoft, he took the initiative to give people control of their home networking and developed the worldwide standard for how we connect our computers to the Internet. Since leaving Microsoft, Bob has done angel investing, consulting, and advising, and currently works with entrepreneurs and established companies on the issues we face as we transition to a software-defined connected world.
Limor "Ladyada" Fried is founder and engineer of New York based Adafruit Industries. Limor started Adafruit in 2005 while at MIT studying engineering. Her goal was to create the best place online for learning electronics for makers of all ages and skill levels. Adafruit has grown to over 100 employees in the heart of New York City with a 50,000 plus square foot factory. Limor was the first female engineer on the cover of Wired Magazine and was awarded Entrepreneur Magazine's Entrepreneur of the Year. Ladyada was on the New York City Industrial Business Advisory Council and Adafruit was ranked Number 11 in the top 20 USA manufacturing companies and number one in New York City by Inc. Magazine's 5000 fastest growing private companies.
Jared Friend is a senior privacy and technology attorney at Hintze Law. His representative areas of experience are free/open-source licensing and compliance, online and mobile tracking, FTC inquiry and order compliance, regulatory data security compliance, development of internal privacy and data security practices, biometrics, and regulatory policy. Jared was formerly the director of the Technology and Liberty Program at the ACLU of Washington, where he was responsible for driving policy work at the intersection of free speech, privacy, and developing technology and for collaborating with the policy and litigation teams throughout the ACLU. Jared attended Berkeley School of Law, where he received the Law and Technology Certificate, worked for the Samuelson Technology Clinic, and was a member of the Berkeley Technology Law Journal submissions team. Prior to law school, Jared worked for a number of technology companies in the Seattle area in test engineering roles.
Nathan Fuller is a writer based in New York City. Before joining Courage, he covered Chelsea Manning's trial for her support network.
Emmanuel Goldstein was responsible for editing all of these bios and was, ironically, completely unable to write one for himself.
Fred Goldstein advises governments and companies on technical, regulatory, and business issues related to the telecommunications, cable, wireless, and Internet industries, especially in areas where they overlap. He assists service providers in network design, business modeling, planning, and technical architecture. He helps municipalities develop their own networks, fiber and wireless, to bring broadband services to unserved areas. He has frequently been an expert witness in patent, regulatory, and telecom disputes. He has worked with enterprise networks on a wide range of matters such as backbone network design, voice systems planning, and traffic engineering. The author of numerous articles and the books The Great Telecom Meltdown and ISDN In Perspective, he has served on standards committees in areas such as ATM networks and frame relay, and has taught courses on various telecom-related subjects.
Debora Gondek is an operational risk manager experienced in assessing information security risk across the application development life cycle. She's worked for several financial services organizations, including Citi, HSBC, and Bear Stearns. Early in her career, she managed a lab where emerging network engineering solutions were evaluated. Later, she helped establish an ethical hacking program at a global bank. She currently designs tools and procedures to measure and manage technology risk.
David Goren is a radio producer and audio archivist with a focus on broadcast culture. His work has been featured on NPR's Lost and Found Sound series, On the Media, Afropop Worldwide, Jazz at Lincoln Center Radio, and shortwaveology.net.
David Goulet is a Tor developer and a developer of Off-the-Record (OTR), which provides end-to-end encryption for IM.
Andy Greenberg is a reporter for Wired, where he writes about information security, privacy, cryptography, and hacker culture. He's the author of the book This Machine Kills Secrets, on the history and future of anonymity, the cypherpunks, and information leaks. In 2013, he conducted the media's only extended interview with the Dread Pirate Roberts, the administrator of the Silk Road dark web black market.
Johannes Grenzfurthner is an award-winning director, artist, writer, and researcher. He lives and works in Vienna, Austria and Durango, Colorado in the USA. He is the founder and artistic director of monochrom, an internationally-acting art and theory group. He likes to engage in "urban hacking", or, more specifically, "context hacking", a term that Grenzfurthner coined. He directed the dark sci-fi comedy Die Gstettensaga: The Rise of Echsenfriedl, the feature documentary Traceroute, and is currently working on several other movie projects (Tycho!, Sierra Zulu, Nothing To Hide). He is one of the most outspoken researchers in the field of sexuality and technology, and one of the founders of "techno-hedonism". He is head of Arse Elektronika (sex and tech festival) in San Francisco, Hedonistika (food tech festival in Montreal and Tel Aviv), and host of Roboexotica (festival for cocktail-robotics) in Vienna. He teaches art theory and art practice at the University of Applied Sciences in Graz, Austria, and is a lecturer on culture jamming at the University of Arts and Industrial Design in Linz, Austria.
Sam Gustin is a journalist focused on the intersection of business, technology, media, and public policy. He is currently a correspondent at Vice Motherboard and previously worked for Time, Wired, and other publications, where he reported on the nation's largest technology and telecom companies and their relationships with the government. He has a master's degree in journalism from Columbia University and a BA in political science from Reed College. From 2014 to 2015, Sam was a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, where he focused his research on U.S. communications policy, with a particular emphasis on community broadband networks.
Phillip Hallam-Baker has been involved in web security since 1992. He was responsible for security issues in the CERN web team and took the payments brief at the newly formed Web Consortium at MIT. After a spell working on the security of an email system deployed in the Clinton-era Executive Office of the President at the MIT AI Lab, he joined VeriSign where he spent 12 years as principal consultant. He currently divides his time between working as vice president and principal scientist at Comodo and as an expert witness in Internet-related cases. He has played a leading role in the development of many Internet standards, in particular, the WebPKI which is the certificate authority run infrastructure that provides credentials for SSL/TLS, SAML and XKMS. He is a member of the IETF Security Area Directorate and holds eight U.S. patents.
Quinn Heath is an undergraduate student studying computer science and criminal justice at Temple University. He has had an interest in computers and hacking since high school, particularly in the study of cybercrime and computer forensics. This is Quinn's first HOPE and first time speaking at a hacking conference.
Weston Hecker has spent 11 years pen-testing and 12 years performing security research and programming. He has worked with a major university and the Department of Homeland Security on 911 emergency systems and attack mitigation. He has found several vulnerabilities in very popular software and firmware, including Microsoft, Qualcomm, Samsung, HTC, and Verizon.
Caitlin Kelly Henry is a Bay Area based attorney and professor. Her practice includes FOIA, watch-list investigations, business formation, and work with incarcerated people.
Michael Hernandez is a Brooklyn born RYT200 certified yoga teacher with plans to get 500 hour certification this year. He's been a software engineer at Etsy for the last five years, and a hacker of a sort for his entire life.
Parker Higgins is an activist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, specializing in issues at the intersection of freedom of speech and copyright, trademark, and patent law. As a participant in EFF's Apollo 1201 project, he is helping Cory Doctorow to eliminate DRM in our lifetime. He previously lived and worked in Berlin, Germany.
Mariko Hirose is a senior staff attorney at the New York Civil Liberties Union, where she has worked on issues involving free speech, privacy, government transparency, and criminal justice. She previously served as a fellow at the Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project of the American Civil Liberties Union. She is also an adjunct professor at the Fordham University School of Law, where she teaches a course on privacy and surveillance in the digital age. Mariko is a graduate of Yale University and Stanford Law School.
Brian Hofer is a member of the Oakland Privacy Working Group, which formed to oppose the Domain Awareness Center. He chaired the DAC ad hoc privacy committee, which has since introduced two City Council adopted privacy and data retention policies, along with an ordinance making the privacy committee permanent.
Jacob Hoffman-Andrews is a lead developer on Let's Encrypt, the free and automated certificate authority. He also works on EFF's Encrypt the Web initiative and is a maintainer on the HTTPS Everywhere browser extension. Prior to working at EFF, Jacob was on Twitter's anti-spam and security teams. On the security team, he implemented HTTPS-by-default with forward secrecy, key pinning, HSTS, and CSP. On anti-spam, he deployed new machine-learned models to detect and block spam in real time. Before Twitter, he worked at Google, variously on the maps, transit, and shopping teams.
Sebastian Holst is chief strategy officer at Preemptive Solutions, makers of application security and analytics products. Over the last 20 years, Sebastian has held leadership positions in risk management, content management, and database software companies. In addition, he has worked to promote computing and industry standards, serving on the W3C Advisory Committee, ActOnline.org, OCEG.org, and as an IDEAlliance board member. Sebastian most recently testified on privacy and IP topics before the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee. He also lends his time to a boutique cybersecurity firm that he cofoundedand to TheMobileYogi, a mobile app portfolio company cofounded with his wife.
Joshua Horowitz's practice is concentrated on litigation matters requiring expertise in technology and computer software. He has served as the technology lawyer on the defense team of multiple federal cybercrime cases in the Southern District of New York, including the Silk Road trial (United States v. Ulbricht) and other international cybercrime matters. He also represents corporate clients in government investigations involving technologically complex legal issues. In the Silk Road case, he submitted an 18-page declaration undermining technical assertions made by the FBI with regard to their discovery of computer servers located abroad. His work raised significant questions about the government's purported methodology in uncovering computer servers hosted as a Tor hidden service, receiving national recognition in Forbes, Wired, TechCrunch, Ars Technica, and other publications. While in law school, Joshua worked at the Software Freedom Law Center, an organization providing legal counsel to Free and Open Source (FOSS) software developers in a broad variety of legal matters. He received his BA from the University of Rochester and JD from Ohio Northern University and launched his practice immediately upon graduating from law school.
Daniel C. Howe is an artist, researcher, and critical technologist whose work focuses on the social and political implications of networks and computational technologies. He has a PhD in computer science and currently lives in Hong Kong, where he teaches at the School of Creative Media.
John Huntington is a professor of entertainment technology at New York City College of Technology (Citytech/CUNY) and also works as an entertainment technology and show control systems consultant, author, and sound designer/engineer. He blogs about entertainment technology at www.controlgeek.net, chases tornadoes in his spare time, and sells photos on www.johnhuntington.photography.
int0x80 is the rapper in Dual Core. Drink all the booze, hack all the things!
Luke Iseman and Heather Stewart live in homes they've built out of shipping containers in the East Bay. They have a negative cost of living monthly, and they think everyone should spend more time building big things out of metal. Luke spends his spare time prototyping hardware and Heather makes giant art.
Jameel Jaffer is a deputy legal director of the National ACLU and Director of the ACLU's Center for Democracy, which houses the National ACLU's work relating to free speech, privacy, technology, national security, and international human rights. He has argued cases in multiple appeals courts, as well as in the U.S. Supreme Court, and he has testified before Congress on several occasions concerning issues relating to counterterrorism policy and civil liberties. He co-led the Freedom of Information Act litigation that resulted in the release of the Bush administration's "torture memos". More recently, he led the ACLU's litigation that resulted in the release of some of the Obama administration's "drone memos".
Joshua is a red teamer and former infantryman who thoroughly enjoys getting into an attacker mindset.
Tom Keenan wrote his first computer program in 1964, worked on some of the earliest timesharing systems, and taught Canada's first computer security course. He is the author of the best-selling book Technocreep and a frequent guest on radio and television. He loves to get people excited and riled up about cool things.
Paul Kernfeld is a software engineer and peer-to-peer systems enthusiast.
Mallory Knodel is the technology policy lead and sysadmin for the Association for Progressive Communications (APC), a member of May First/People Link's steering committee, and on the executive board of eQualit.ie.
Evan Koblentz is a technology journalist and president of the nonprofit Vintage Computer Federation.
Spencer (nibalizer) Krum has been sysoping Linux since 2010. He works for IBM, contributing upstream to OpenStack and Puppet. Spencer coordinates the local DevOps user group in Portland and volunteers for an ops-training program at Portland State University called the Braindump. Spencer lives and works in Portland, Oregon where he enjoys tennis, cheeseburgers, and StarCraft II.
Chris Kubecka , owner of HypaSec, currently advises several governments on their critical infrastructure with a focus on water, oil and gas, and nuclear industries. She is the former group leader of Aramco Overseas in The Netherlands and led their security operations center. She holds degrees in aeronautical engineering, computer science, and information technology. Chris holds an alphabet soup of certifications. Her hobbies include research of smartphone/Android OS exploitation, cyber warfare, process and automated control systems, DNS and IPv6 protocols, cryptography, SIEM's/correlation engines, and cyber-intelligence. Chris has over 20 years of extensive experience in the field of information security. Her career has spanned from the U.S. Air Force, Space Command, and the private and public sector.
Ryan Lackey has been involved in computer security since discovering the cypherpunks mailing list in the early 1990s. He founded the world's first offshore datahaven (HavenCo) and then spent a decade building satellite and wireless communications networks in conflict zones in the Middle East. After returning to the U.S., he founded CryptoSeal, a server-side tamper-resistant computing company which also operated a VPN, which he sold to CloudFlare in 2014. He now is founder of Travel Fleet, a startup solving travel security problems for corporate executives and professionals going to high risk environments around the world.
Michael Swan Laufer worked in mathematics and high energy physics until he decided to use his background in science to tackle problems of world health and other social issues. Perpetually disruptive, his most recent project makes it possible for people to manufacture their own medications at home. Open-source, and made from off-the-shelf parts, the Apothecary MicroLab puts many medications within the reach of those who would otherwise not have them.
Mathieu Lavoie recently graduated from ETS and works as a pentester for a large financial institution. He previously worked as a malware researcher at ESET and as a computer security freelancer. During his free time, he is an avid participant to many CTFs in the infamous CISSP Groupies (now called DCI-ETS), where he developed a deep love-hate relationship with crypto challenges or Defcon's so-called "web" challenges. As such, he was multiple times a finalist at the CSAW competition, and can even be seen somewhere on their website (no points for this flag). He speak at some local conferences including the first NorthSec conference in Montreal.
Timothy Libert is a doctoral candidate at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania and a research fellow at the Alexander von Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society in Berlin. His research focuses on privacy-compromising information flows on the web, and he is the author of the open-source software platform webXray. He has published work in The Communications of the Association for Computing Machinery, The International Journal of Communication, and The BMJ (British Medical Journal). His work has received international press coverage and he has been interviewed by National Public Radio's All Things Considered, Good Morning America, and other outlets. His publications may be downloaded at his personal website: https://timlibert.me.
Gareth Llewellyn moves packets around the Internet for a living, is a technical volunteer for the OpenRightsGroup (e.g. helping to design and build www.blocked.org.uk), and founder of Brass Horn Communications.
During his nearly half-century career of movement activism, organization, and writing, Alfredo Lopez has been a leader in the Puerto Rican independence, labor, and antiwar movements, an organizer of several major national demonstrations and scores of smaller ones, editor of two publications (Claridad and Sevendays Magazine), a radio and television producer/host, a college professor, and author of six published books and hundreds of published articles. He is a founder and leader of May First/People Link, the largest political progressive Internet membership organization in the U.S., and in that capacity he has helped shape much of May First's service provision system (including the 130 virtual server system shared by May First members), helped develop the organization's how-to and help systems, and participated in developing its suite of free and open-source software that the organization makes available to its members. Alfredo is a prominent leader in the struggle over net neutrality and has organized rallies, teach-ins, and congressional lobbying visits to push for its protection, and writes extensively on issues like privacy, data protection, net neutrality, and open access for the online publication This Can't Be Happening. He currently serves on the board of the Center for Media Justice, is a member of the steering committee of MAGNet (the Media Action Grassroots Network), and is a member of the National Planning Committee of the U.S. Social Forum.
Lauri Love is a British activist, part of the 2011 Hetherington House Occupation, who is charged with breaching multiple U.S. government computers. He is currently fighting extradition to the United States (which is why he will be on a video link).
Tom Lowenthal is a technologist and activist committed to combating our contemporary cyberpunk mass-surveillance dystopia. By day, he's the staff technologist for the tech program at the Committee to Protect Journalists. By night, he practices healthy self-care because mental health is really important and burnout can be a killer. Tom's also a fellow at Stanford's Center for Internet and Society; he's previously worked at the Tor Project and Mozilla. He's a big believer in individual privacy, self-determination, and practical usable tools.
Nick Lum is a jack of a few trades and master of none. After spending several years in corporate America, Nick launched BeeLine Reader (somewhat by accident) on Hacker News. Since dedicating himself full-time to this startup, it has won social entrepreneurship awards from Stanford University and The Tech Museum of Innovation.
Alex Marthews is the national chair of Restore The Fourth, an anti-surveillance movement with chapters across the country. Alex holds a master's degree in public policy from UC Berkeley, and used to intern at EFF back when it was small.
Apostolos Mastoris is an ethical hacker working as a security consultant at MWR InfoSecurity in London. His interest in security began when he was involved in the 2600 meetings in Athens, Greece. His day-to-day activities include application and infrastructure penetration testing and consulting clients on ways to improve the security of their environments. He holds a BSc in computer engineering and an MSc in information security. In his free time (when there's any), he enjoys reading recent updates in the security community, doing some coding, and getting involved in problem solving activities.
Sequoia McDowell is a software engineer & educator based in Massachusetts. Champion of noobs & enemy of elitism, he loves getting beginners into the game, whether it's programming or encrypted comms.
Nicholas Merrill is the executive director of The Calyx Institute, a nonprofit educational organization based in New York City. Prior to founding The Calyx Institute, he founded one of the first Internet service providers in New York: Calyx Internet Access in 1994. In 2004, he began a 12-year legal challenge to National Security Letters, and their unconstitutional searches and "gag orders" - another term for non-disclosure orders.
Matt Mitchell is a Security Researcher, Operational Security Trainer, and Hacker in New York.
Drew Mitnick focuses on digital security, digital due process, and privacy. He has experience working on human rights in Asia and the United States.
Michael Morisy is the founder of MuckRock, a non-profit investigative news site and public records tool. He was previously a John S. Knight Journalism Fellow at Stanford and an editor at the Boston Globe.
Alex Muentz is both an information security consultant and a lawyer with a fondness for seersucker in this heat. He's spoken at a bunch of conferences you've heard of (HOPE, Defcon, ShmooCon). He occasionally takes pro-bono cases and attempts to avoid career-limiting moves.
Deb Nicholson wants to make the world a better place with technology and social justice for all. She likes talking to developers about software patents, to project maintainers about leadership, and to activists about free software. In the service of worldwide free software promotion, she is a prolific speaker, writer, and both IRL and IRC meeting attender. When she's at home in Massachusetts, she volunteers for Girls Rock Campaign, haunts the science fiction book store, and keeps a small herb garden.
Nikgod is a reformed network engineer who occasionally pretends to know how radio works. Once he figured out how to hack AOL 2.0 parental controls, the Internet scarred him for life. Nikgod functions as the chief engineer of Radio Statler, coming up with solutions to the hard technical problems and running up a tab on his credit cards in the process.
Nite 0wl has been picking and bypassing locks since kindergarten and continues to do this at his own expense. He has spoken on communications and physical security at The New York Times as well as at various less formal events. You may have recognized him in his recurring role as "sleep deprived volunteer who is outweighed by his beard" at previous HOPE conferences or at various TOOOL lockpicking villages.
Grace North is a prisoner support activist who leads Jeremy Hammond's support network and has advocated for prisoners' rights for years.
Deviant Ollam is a member of the board of directors of The Open Organisation Of Lockpickers (TOOOL) in the United States. Growing up with James Bond films and the TV show I Spy, he was fascinated with lockpicking from a young age, but never really got deep into this topic until witnessing TOOOL members firsthand at HOPE. He now helps to run the lockpick village at many cons around the world, has published books, and has visited over 100 cities across 17 countries teaching about lockpicking.
Deji Olukotun manages Access' global campaigns to protect the open internet, stop mass surveillance, protect digital privacy, and ensure that our fundamental rights are respected online. He came from the literary and human rights organization PEN American Center, where he founded PEN's digital freedom program and managed its capacity-building work in Myanmar, South Africa, Haiti, and Nigeria. He has also worked as corporate counsel for a small technology startup. A devoted fiction writer, Deji is the author of the novel Nigerians in Space (Unnamed Press). His work has been featured in The Atlantic, NPR, The New York Times, and Vice.
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, Kurt counsels on EFF projects and initiatives. He is the lead attorney on the Coders' Rights Project. Before joining EFF, Kurt worked at Perkins Coie, where he represented technology clients with respect to intellectual property, privacy, defamation, and other online liability matters, including working on Kelly v. Arribasoft, MGM v. Grokster and CoStar v. LoopNet. For his work responding to government subpoenas, he is proud to have been called a "rabid dog" by the Department of Justice. Kurt received his law degree from Boalt Hall and undergraduate degree from U.C. Santa Cruz. He co-authored Electronic Media and Privacy Law Handbook. In 2007, Kurt was named as one of the "Attorneys of the Year" by California Lawyer magazine for his work on the O'Grady v. Superior Court appeal. In 2014, he was elected to the USENIX Board of Directors.
Shaf Patel is a blind locksmith and tech enthusiast from London, U.K. He has a passion for cyber security, coding, encryption, social engineering, disability advocacy, and human rights. He also enjoys partaking in passionate debates and is always open to new ideas and opportunities.
Howard Payne is an elevator consultant with a strong interest in locks and physical security. He is a proponent of freedom of information laws, and an opponent of open standards that call for specific key combinations (especially when it pertains to elevators).
Ellen Pearlman is a PhD candidate at The School of Creative Media, Hong Kong City University. She is director and curator of the Volumetric Society of New York, a 2400 member organization, and president of Art-A-Hack, which brings artists and technologists together to make something new.
Jeremy Pesner is a multidisciplinary technologist, researcher, policy analyst, and gamer who holds a BS in computer science from Dickinson College and an MA in communication, culture, and technology from Georgetown University. He is fascinated by questions and implications of technology, media, and games across entertainment, education, and the blending of arts and science. He has worked for educational games company E-Line media and helped to run the Music and Gaming Education Symposium at the Music and Gaming Festival for the past six years, where he has spoken and demonstrated extensively on how to evaluate player experiences in video games. He is also passionate about other technology issues like broadband, technological innovation, and how technology can make a positive difference in lives throughout the world.
Ed Platt makes technology and communities, often at the same time. He is currently doing PhD research on decentralized communities at the University of Michigan School of Information. Before coming to UMSI, he cofounded the i3 Detroit hackerspace and worked as a researcher at the MIT Center for Civic Media.
Kyle Polich has been a data scientist for over a decade. He hosts the Data Skeptic podcast that explores the intersection of data, machine learning, statistics, and scientific skepticism.
Renee Pollack is a Blackstone security analyst who has researched mobile malware and vulnerabilities in applications and cellular networks.
Max Power is one of TOOOL's most active and level-up members. When he's not powerlifting padlocks in order to see just how much weight his adamantium reinforced bones can bear, he's methodically polishing the pick tools that can extend from his knuckles like claws for attacking deadbolts and door locks. If you see Max, either steer clear or give him a splendid high five and ask how his local Boston sports teams are doing... because no one from The City on The Hill will miss a chance at that discussion. (Max didn't write this bio but he supremely likes the fellow who did.)
David Pozen is a professor at Columbia Law School. A former special assistant to Senator Edward M. Kennedy and law clerk to Justice John Paul Stevens, he has written widely on government secrecy and on constitutional law and theory. His recent academic articles include "Privacy-Privacy Tradeoffs" (University of Chicago Law Review), "Uncivil Obedience" (Columbia Law Review), and "The Leaky Leviathan: Why the Government Condemns and Condones Unlawful Disclosures of Information" (Harvard Law Review).
Cooper Quintin is a security researcher and programmer at EFF. He has worked on projects such as Privacy Badger, Canary Watch, Ethersheet, and analysis of state sponsored malware. He has also performed security trainings for activists, nonprofit workers, and ordinary folks around the world. He previously worked building websites for nonprofits such as Greenpeace, Adbusters, and the Chelsea Manning Support Network. He also was a cofounder of the Hackbloc hacktivist collective. In his spare time, he enjoys playing music and participating in street protests.
R3dfish has a passion for emerging technologies and pursues many projects dealing with the implementation of bleeding edge software, open source operating systems, and infant programming paradigms in order to solve the problems posed by the widespread adoption of current technologies. He has experience developing the full web stack, Django/Python, mobile apps, and Wi-Fi pineapple apps. He enjoys conversations about old school phreaking.
Jesselyn Radack is an attorney and director of the Whistleblower and Source Protection Program (WHISPeR) at ExposeFacts. She is a former Justice Department whistleblower, representing Edward Snowden, Thomas Drake, and numerous drone pilot whistleblowers.
Steven Rambam is the founder and CEO of Pallorium, Inc., a licensed investigative agency with offices and affiliates worldwide. Steven has coordinated investigations in more than 60 countries, and he specializes in international and multi-jurisdictional investigations, investigations of sophisticated frauds, and missing person investigations. Many of Steven's activities involve coordination with national authorities, and Steven has received commendations and awards in a number of foreign locations. He has also received a number of foreign military decorations, and his activities have been mentioned in sessions of the Canadian and Israeli Parliaments. Steven is perhaps best publicly known for his pro bono activities, which have included the location and investigation of nearly 200 Nazi collaborators and war criminals in the USA, Canada, Europe, and Australia. He has also coordinated efforts to expose terrorist groups' fundraising activities in the United States and has conducted investigations which resulted in the tightening of airport security in eight U.S. cities. He has been the host of Discovery ID's Nowhere To Hide and History Channel's Hunting reality television shows, and is scheduled to host "Private Justice" TV. (Nowhere To Hide premiered at HOPE X and past episodes are available via iTunes, Amazon, and, undoubtedly, Kickass Torrents.) Steven has presented at every HOPE since Number One.
Michael Ravnitzky is an attorney, engineer and journalist in Maryland.
Aunshul Rege is an assistant professor in the criminal justice department at Temple University. Trained as a criminologist, some of her research interests include critical infrastructure cyberattacks; cybercrimes against gambling and dating websites, understanding how migrant women in IS use social media, and interacting with the hacking community at large.
Garrett Robinson is the CTO at Freedom of the Press Foundation and the lead developer of SecureDrop. His interest in empowering whistleblowers through technology began when he was involved with environmental activism in Appalachia, and that led to the creation of a whistleblower submission site called Honest Appalachia. He previously worked full time as a security and privacy engineer for Mozilla, and also for the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
schneider is an embedded software and hardware developer and member of the Munich Chaos Computer Club group. He likes to hit the "Remote Update" button for thousands of devices every now and then.
Jason Scott's official title at the Internet Archive is "free-range archivist", which means he spends a very large amount of time acquiring a very large amount of data. He founded textfiles.com in 1998 and continues to warp minds daily as a result.
Kathleen Seubert is an information security and compliance professional. She has worked in financial services and retail with organizations to develop, create, and test their business continuity plan. She has also created global information security policy and awareness programs including content for online e-learning. She has planned, executed, and managed various compliance efforts.
Carey Shenkman is a First Amendment and human rights attorney with the Center for Constitutional Rights representing journalists, including Julian Assange and WikiLeaks.
Elissa Shevinsky is a serial entrepreneur and an activist on behalf of transparency and free speech. Recent work includes building end-to-end encrypted applications such as Glimpse, and being head of product at Brave Software. She is also the editor of Lean Out, published by OR Books.
Robert Simmons is a senior threat intelligence researcher at ThreatConnect, Inc. With an expertise in building automated malware analysis systems based on open-source tools, he has been tracking malware and phishing attacks and picking them apart for years. Robert is also the author of PlagueScanner, an open-source virus scanner framework.
Dean Sysman is CTO and co-founder of Cymmetria, a cyber deception start-up. A unit 8200 veteran, Dean started his military intelligence career first as a low-level security researcher, later on promoted to the rank of Captain to lead high level security research, earning multiple awards for his service. Already when he was 15, he won first place in the prestigious Robotics Olympiad, and by the age of 19 earned his B.Sc. in computer sciences. Dean has previously spoken at Blackhat, CCC, BSides and more. Before joining Cymmetria, Dean was involved in the development of cross platform translation compiler for embedded processors.
Craig Smith is the author of the Car Hacker's Handbook and founder of OpenGarages.org.
Jesse Sowell holds a PhD in technology, management, and policy from MIT's Engineering Systems Division, and will be joining Stanford's Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC) as cybersecurity policy fellow in October. His dissertation evaluated common resource management institutions that sustain the integrity of the Internet's routing system, and documented the authoritative institutions these communities have developed for managing information resources such as numbers and routing information.
Richard Stallman launched the free software movement in 1983 and started the development of the GNU operating system (see www.gnu.org) in 1984. (GNU is free software: everyone has the freedom to copy it and redistribute it, with or without changes. The GNU/Linux system, basically the GNU operating system with Linux added, is used on tens of millions of computers today.) Stallman has received the ACM Grace Hopper Award, a MacArthur Foundation fellowship, the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Pioneer Award, and the Takeda Award for Social/Economic Betterment, as well as several doctorates honoris causa, and has been inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame.
Amie Stepanovich is an expert in domestic surveillance, cybersecurity, and privacy law. At Access Now, Amie leads projects on digital due process and responds to threats at the intersection of human rights and communications surveillance.
Lisha Sterling is the executive director at Geeks Without Bounds, a nonprofit organization that supports open-source humanitarian projects through hackathons and an accelerator program. She is listed in the P2P Foundation's list of "100 Women Co-Creating the Peer-To-Peer Society". She has been a software developer for over 20 years. She brings that experience together with her formal education in Latin American studies and early work experience in international aid and refugee support to help engineers and those who work in crisis response build common languages for working on a wide range of challenges.
Stoppay joined Radio Statler during The Next HOPE (2010) and has since managed the website. He works best under pressure and with little sleep, creating the site and content on the fly. He is known to do on-air interviews from time to time and plays the devil's advocate regardless of his opinion on the subject.
Morgan Strobel is a senior security and privacy professional in the Risk Consulting Services group at Crowe Horwath. Prior to joining Crowe, she worked in IT audit consulting for three years servicing clients in multiple industries. Morgan's experience includes information security assessments, detailed technical analysis, supporting clients with compliance to various regulations and security standards, vendor risk management, and privacy risk assessments.
Kit Stubbs is a non-binary/queer/pansexual roboticist, maker, and entrepreneur who's more interested in people than in technology. Kit earned their PhD in robotics from Carnegie Mellon University in 2008 and later launched the Effing Foundation for Sex-Positivity (effing.org), a nonprofit whose mission is to reduce sexual shame by fostering sex-positive artists and educators. They blog about technological empowerment for sexuality and pleasure, including their experiences and creations, at toymakerproject.com. Kit also organizes teasecraft-boston, a meetup group for sex/kink-positive makers (teasecraft.com). They are excited to be back at HOPE after presenting "The Sex Geek as Culture Hacker" at HOPE X. You can also see Kit's work featured in Johannes Grenzfurthner's film Traceroute.
TechDarko is an information security engineer in San Francisco and technology polymath. Created in the lab of a mad scientist in New Jersey, he craves pizza, bagels, diners, and people with brains. He dabbles in emergency medicine, amateur radio, professional audio and lighting, electronics, broadcast radio, and helping nonprofits adopt new technology. A man of uncommon tastes, he is best bribed/thanked with good ciders and mead. You can often find him at HOPE by hurting yourself (seriously - don't interrupt his drinking time). TechDarko is a founding member of Radio Statler.
Phillip Torrone is partner at Adafruit, helping to manage the day-to-day challenges of running a factory in New York City. He was previously senior editor at Make Magazine, producing the Make blog, creating the Make video series, and working on the Maker Shed online store and Maker Faire. He was also senior editor at Popular Science, how-to editor at Engadget, and founder of Hackaday.com.
Since 1990, TProphet has been a regular writer, speaker, and columnist for 2600: The Hacker Quarterly. He believes that most of the world's problems can be solved when people talk together on the phone.
Mary Tsang is an artist-biologist, jungle-dweller, critical-learner, xeno-feminist, optimistic-fatalist, & proud-amateur, wavering between observer and doer, using documentary video to embed myself in the worlds I'm interested in exploring. If you are a biologist, artist, "bio-artist," DIY-biologist, hobbyist, bio-hacker, bio-punk, xeno-punk, and/or citizen scientist, please contact me at mymgtsang@gmail.com. I want to find more people like me.
Alexander Urbelis, CEO of Black Chambers Inc., an information security consultancy, and a partner in the Blackstone Law Group, is an attorney who has also been part of the Infosec community for more than 20 years, and a part of 2600 in one way or another since 1994. Over the years, Alex has worked for the U.S. Army, Dartmouth College's Institute for Security Technology Studies (a federally funded cybersecurity and counterterrorism research center), the CIA, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces, the international law firm of Steptoeand Johnson, and as information security counsel and chief compliance officer of one of the world's largest luxury conglomerates. Alex holds a BA, summa cum laude, in philosophy from Stony Brook University, a JD, magna cum laude, from Vermont Law School, and the BCL from New College, Oxford University.
Filippo Valsorda is a systems and cryptography engineer at CloudFlare, where he kicked DNSSEC until it became something deployable. Nevertheless, he's probably best known for making popular online vulnerability tests, including the original Heartbleed test. He's really supposed to implement cryptosystems, not break them, but you know how it is.
Sacha van Geffen is the managing director of Greenhost, a Dutch web hosting company dedicated to providing a sustainable Internet infrastructure and protecting digital civil rights. He is co-author of Basic Internet Security (a manual primarily for journalists on securing online communication) and a participant in the broader effort to build more secure systems.
Roy Wattanasin is an adjunct faculty at Brandeis University in both the health and medical informatics and information security graduate programs. He is also a health care information security professional. Roy spends most of his time leading, teaching, and developing information security programs, finding vulnerabilities, performing incident response, and working on many projects.
In October 2009, over three years before Snowden confirmed it, Marcy Wheeler guessed that parts of President Bush's Stellar Wind program had been moved to FISA pen registers and Section 215. She stupidly allowed herself to be persuaded to stop pursuing that guess - a mistake she hopes to avoid in the future. She continues to find the hidden traces of surveillance programs in public documents and government obfuscation, both at her own site, emptywheel.net, as well as at other outlets. Marcy has a PhD in comparative literature and lives in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
David Williams-King grew up in the Canadian countryside in a solar-powered house, and is now a computer science PhD student at Columbia University. He researches randomization-based security techniques and maintains an interest in graphics, compilers, and speech recognition. David is privileged to have taught C++ with Bjarne Stroustrup, and proud to have once received an award at the ACM Turing Award ceremony.
Alex Winter entered show business as a child actor on Broadway and came to prominence in movies such as Warner Brothers' hit The Lost Boys and the wildly popular Bill and Ted franchise. He has directed three narrative features: cult classic Freaked for 20th Century Fox; Fever for Lionsgate, which screened at Cannes; and Smosh: The Movie, which opened in 2015 as the number one comedy on iTunes. Winter's TV credits range from MTV's The Idiot Box to Emmy-nominated work for Cartoon Network, as well as numerous commercials and music videos. Alex is the recipient of the Charles Guggenheim award for his directing work. His VH1 rock doc Downloaded has earned nationwide critical acclaim at theatrical and festival screenings. His latest award-winning documentary Deep Web had a critically acclaimed world premiere at SXSW and a broadcast premiere in the U.S. on the Epix network. The film opened as the number one documentary on iTunes in September 2015. Alex is now making the definitive documentary on Frank Zappa, which set the record as the highest funded documentary in Kickstarter history.
XioNYC (n NeoAmsterdam): The programmer that isn't, master of the splice block, #FailFactory survivor, third eye for the blind, AMD VIZ Vet; F/S. Have OLPC XO-1 will travel; en_US, es_AR, yc2600; 0113-1141, 0194-357X, 0-287222-3, 0-74471-01720-1, 0-201-37937-6, 0-8143-3203-X.
Johnny Xmas is a penetration tester for RedLegg, based in Chicago, and has been speaking internationally on the topics of information security, career advancement, and social engineering for nearly 15 years, both in and very far outside of the information security community. His infamous mixture of humor, raw sincerity, and honest love of people lead to hilarious - but at their core serious - discussions revolving around our inherent desire to get in our own way.
Tamara Yadao, multimedia artist and performer, works with conceptual methods of sound-making, music-making, and video by repurposing new and antiquated forms of technology including gaming hardware and software, radios, and transmitters. She also writes chip music under the moniker Corset Lore and has a release on Philly chip music imprint 8static, while also appearing on compilations from 8bitpeoples and Pxl-Win. She is delighted to be curating and coordinating the live music concerts for The Eleventh HOPE.
Stefan "Sec" Zehl studied computer science and has been working for various companies in the security industry, is a longtime member of the Chaos Computer Club, and is one of the founders of the Munich CCC group. He was part of the team that created the rad1o badge for the Chaos Communication Camp - delivering 4500 broadband SDRs based on the HackRF to the security researcher community.
Lucas Zhao (UrbanHawk) is a 16-year-old lockpicker with a special interest in Chinese locks and an avid collector, with a collection mostly consisting of unusual Chinese-made locks. He has been dissecting and researching locks since he was ten years of age, and has a fairly comprehensive knowledge of all things related to locks. Lucas loves to talk endlessly about his lock interests to anyone who will listen, much to the annoyance of his friends. He also knows too much about other random topics such as elevators and the Metro-North Railroad, which his friends now avoid in order to keep him from talking endlessly about those as well.
Yan Zhu is a security software engineer and friend of Chelsea Manning.