Sam Geall

Executive Editor, China Dialogue

Ben Creet

Policy Manager, InternetNZ

Lorrayne Porciuncula

Internet Economist, OECD

Adrian Lovett

President & CEO, World Wide Web Foundation

Befekadu Hailu

Author, Blogger and Pro-Democracy Activist

Ingibjörg Sólrún Gísladóttir

Director, OSCE Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights

Moez Chakchouk

Assistant Director-General, UNESCO

Burcu Kilic

Director, Digital Rights Program, Public Citizen

Nanjala Nyabola

Writer and political analyst

Nighat Dad

Executive Director, Digital Rights Foundation

Nighat Dad is the Executive Director of Digital Rights Foundation, Pakistan. She is an accomplished lawyer and a human rights activist.Nighat Dad is one of the pioneers who have been campaigning around access to open internet in Pakistan and globally. She has been actively campaigning and engaging at a policy level on issues focusing on Internet Freedom, Women and technology, Digital Security and Women’s empowerment. Ms.Dad has been recently included in Next Generation Leaders List by TIME's magazine for her work on helping women fight online harassment.

Margaret L. Satterthwaite

Faculty Director, Robert L. Bernstein Institute for Human Rights

Alp Toker

Executive Director, Turkey Blocks

Alp Toker is founder of internet shutdown watchdog Turkey Blocks and chief technologist at TVHI Media Lab, the R&D group behind NewsKit, a suite of secure publishing, verification and investigative tools for journalists. Alp is currently heading up development of a technology platform that can detect and classify mass-scale social media censorship and internet restrictions in real-time to identify emerging threats to media freedom and freedom of expression online. Alp studied Artificial Intelligence at the University of Edinburgh and coordinates research on immersive storytelling, Virtual Reality and algorithmic journalism as part of his work at the lab. Over the last year he has run workshops with Reporters Without Borders, Freedom House and Columbia School of Journalism, writing and reporting for international news outlets on the intersection of conflict and cyber-security and working to enable the free and independent exchange of information online.

David Kaye

UN Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Opinion and Expression

Prof. Kaye’s scholarship and teaching focus on public international law, especially international human rights law, international humanitarian law, accountability for violations of human rights, and the law governing the use of force. He is just as interested in efforts to translate international law—especially human rights law—in a domestic American context, whether in courts, legislatures, or the executive branches of government, at federal and state levels.Prof. Kaye has been appointed by the UN Human Rights Council to serve as Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of the right to freedom of opinion and expression, effective August 1, 2014, for three years. With the assistance of students in his International Justice Clinic, Prof. Kaye will report to the UN on some of the key issues in free expression worldwide, such as the safety of journalists, severe restrictions placed on Internet access and usage, the chilling effects of electronic surveillance, hate speech and incitement to violence. Prof. Kaye began his legal career with the U.S. State Department, handling such subjects as international claims, nuclear nonproliferation, international humanitarian law, and accountability for war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide. Prior to joining UC Irvine, he co-founded UCLA’s International Human Rights Program and founded its International Justice Clinic, working on projects dealing with accountability for international crimes around the world. In addition to his scholarship and teaching, Professor Kaye is an active member of the American Society of International Law, for which he served on its Executive Council and Executive Committee, and is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. He has also published essays and opinion pieces in mainstream publications such as Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, The New York Times, and The Los Angeles Times. As a clinical teacher, Professor Kaye aims to help students discover and put to use tools to advocate for implementation of human rights law and accountability for serious violations and to assist those worldwide who are looking to build the rule of law in their own countries. He also believes in scholarship that helps advance our understanding of how international law operates—and in translating that scholarship, as much as possible, to the broader public and policymaking communities.

Sherif Elsayed-Ali

Director of Partnerships, AI for Good

Sherif Elsayed-Ali is director of partnerships at Element AI, where he is responsible for partnerships with other institutions to advance the public benefit using artificial intelligence. He is co-chair of the World Economic Forum's Global Future Council on human rights and technology, and a fellow at the Carr Center for Human Rights at Harvard Kennedy School. Formerly, Sherif founded Amnesty Tech, which leads Amnesty International’s work on the impact of technology on human rights and the potential uses of new technologies to advance human rights protection. He held a number of other positions at Amnesty, including as director of global issues with responsibility for the organization’s research and advocacy on transitional human rights issues, and before that was global head of refugee and migrants’s rights. Sherif studied engineering and international law at the American University in Cairo and has a master in public administration from Harvard Kennedy School.

Rebecca MacKinnon

Director of Ranking Digital Rights

Rebecca MacKinnon is director of the Ranking Digital Rights project at the New America Foundation, developing a system to rank the world's most powerful Internet, telecommunications, and other ICT sector companies on free expression and privacy criteria. Author of Consent of the Networked: The Worldwide Struggle For Internet Freedom (Basic Books, 2012) MacKinnon is co-founder of the citizen media network Global Voices Online, whose Board of Directors she presently chairs. She also serves on the board of the Committee to Protect Journalists and was a founding board member of the Global Network Initiative. She is also a visiting affiliate at the Annenberg School for Communication’s Center for Global Communications Studies. Before launching Ranking Digital Rights, she was a senior research fellow (2012-2013) and Bernard L. Schwartz senior fellow (2010-2012) at the New America Foundation. Fluent in Mandarin Chinese, MacKinnon was CNN’s Beijing Bureau Chief from 1998-2001 and Tokyo Bureau Chief from 2001-2003. Since leaving CNN in 2004 she has held fellowships at Harvard’s Shorenstein Center on the Press and Public Policy, the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, the Open Society Foundations, and Princeton’s Center for Information Technology Policy. For two years in 2007-08 she served on the faculty of the University of Hong Kong’s Journalism and Media Studies Centre, and taught as an adjunct lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania Law School in Fall 2013. She received her AB magna cum laude from Harvard University and was a Fulbright scholar in Taiwan.

Tara Denham

Director, Democracy Unit, Global Affairs Canada

Tara Denham is the Director of the Democracy Unit at Global Affairs Canada, which includes the Digital Inclusion Lab. Her team is responsible for supporting the department in defining and advancing democracy through various policies and programming initiatives, including looking at how technology can be used in innovative ways to advance foreign policy priorities. The Digital Inclusion Lab focuses on engagement, research, analysis, and testing of tools in order to understand the rapidly evolving intersection of technology and foreign policy. Previously, she managed programming teams within the Stabilization and Reconstruction Task Force, including the portfolios of the Middle East, Afghanistan, democracy and human rights, and peace support operations. She has also been deployed to Afghanistan as the Chief of Staff to the Representative of Canada to Kandahar (2009-2010). She has worked with the Department for 14 years, and previously worked in the non-governmental sector. Ms Denham has a Masters degree from the Norman Paterson School of International Affairs, with a focus on conflict studies.

Eileen Donahoe

Director of Global Affairs, Human Rights Watch

Eileen Donahoe is the Director of Global Affairs at Human Rights Watch where she represents the organization worldwide on human rights foreign policy, with special emphasis on digital rights, cybersecurity and Internet governance. She served as the first US Ambassador to the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva from 2010-2013. Donahoe is a Co-Chair of the NETmundial Initiative on global multi-stakeholder Internet governance. She serves as a member of the Freedom Online Coalition Working Group on Freedom & Security focused on bringing a human rights based approach to cybersecurity policy. She is an Affiliate at the Center for International Security & Cooperation and a Visiting Scholar at the Freeman Spogli Institute at Stanford University. Research interests include implications of digital technology for human rights, adaptation of the international human rights law framework for the digital context, cybersecurity through a human rights lens, development of the multi-stakeholder Internet governance ecosystem, international norms governing use of force, UN reform, and ethical justifications for humanitarian military intervention. In her earlier career, Donahoe was a technology litigator at Fenwick & West in Silicon Valley. She holds a bachelor’s degree from Dartmouth, a master’s of theological studies from Harvard, a master’s in East Asian studies from Stanford, a J.D. from Stanford Law School, and a Ph.D. in Ethics and Social Theory from GTU at UC Berkeley. She is a member of the Board of Trustees of Freedom House and the Council on Foreign Relations.

Ramy Raoof

Technologist and Privacy Researcher

Ramy is a technologist, privacy and security researcher. He interacts with a wide spectrum ranging from NGOs, journalists, lawyers, politicians, and artists on the intersection of tech and social causes, mainly on privacy and security, by devoting his skills as a techie and passion for free/open culture. Ramy develops privacy protocols, and in his research he focuses on surveillance patterns and holistic privacy. In the course of his work, he has provided and developed digital security plans and strategies for NGOs and members of the media, emergency response in cases of physical threats, support on publishing sensitive materials, secure systems for managing sensitive information, and operational plans for human rights emergency response teams, in Egypt and the MENA region. Most recently, Ramy has been volunteering with different NGOs and civil liberty groups in Central & South America, to enhance their privacy and security through means of behavioral change based on understanding surveillance and threat models in their own contexts and environments. In October 2017, Ramy received the international award Heroes of Human Rights and Communications Surveillance, "for exhaustive efforts to reveal invasive and harmful surveillance tactics that are being used to harm users at risk.", by Access Now. In May 2016 he received the international Bobs Award - Best of Online Activism in recognition for his work in digital security and privacy. In January 2016, he was named in the World Top 100 Info Security Influencers list by CISO Platform in India. In 2012, he was ranked number 10 by the Newsweek Magazine in the Revolutionaries list of the Digital Power Index, after being ranked number 14 by Forbes Middle East in Top 100 Arab Presence on Twitter a year earlier.

Michael Posner

Director of NYU Stern Center for Business & Human Rights

Michael Posner is the Director of the Center for Business and Human Rights and the Jerome Kohlberg Professor of Ethics and Finance at NYU Stern. From September 2009 until March 2013, he served in the Obama Administration as Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights and Labor at the U.S. State Department. From 1978 to 2009, he was the Executive Director and the President of Human Rights First, a U.S.-based human rights advocacy organization. As Assistant Secretary of State, Michael traveled to more than 40 countries where he represented the U.S. government on a wide range of human rights issues. He has played a major role in shaping U.S. policy from inside and outside of government on issues ranging from refugee and asylum law and policy, national security and human rights, Internet freedom, and business and human rights. Michael played a key role in proposing and campaigning for the first U.S. law providing for political asylum, which became part of the Refugee Act of 1980, as well as the Torture Victim Protection Act, which was adopted in 1992. Michael holds a JD from the University of California, Berkeley Law School, and a BA with distinction and honors from the University of Michigan.

Natasha Jackson

Head of Public Policy and Consumer Affairs, GSMA