Data & Privacy: Emerging Issues During COVID-19

Adam Schwartz joined EFF as a Senior Staff Attorney in 2015. He advocates before courts and legislatures against surveillance and censorship. He has represented travelers subjected to warrantless smartphone searches by border officers, dissidents seeking to speak in government social media, and customers of phone companies that unlawfully sold location data. He has filed amicus briefs addressing the right to record on-duty police, perpetual location-tracking of court-involved people, face surveillance by corporations of consumers, and overbroad laws against so-called "cyber stalking." Through FOIA enforcement litigation, he helped expose new information about AT&T's "Hemisphere" phone snooping program. He has worked to pass bills to to protect consumer data privacy, and to stop high-tech surveillance of immigrants.

Previously, Adam worked at the ACLU of Illinois for 19 years, and clerked for Judge Betty B. Fletcher of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. He earned a J.D. from Howard University and a B.A. from Cornell University.

Matthew Kugler is an associate professor at Northwestern Pritzker School of Law. Prior to joining Northwestern, Kugler completed a Ph.D. in Psychology and Social Policy at Princeton University, was a postdoctoral fellow and adjunct instructor in psychology at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, PA. He was awarded a JD with highest honors from the University of Chicago Law School. His research addresses questions at the intersection of psychology and law. He is particularly interested in issues of intellectual property, privacy, and criminal procedure.

Jennifer Daskal is a Professor and Faculty Director of the Tech, Law, and Security Program at American University Washington College of Law, where she teaches and writes in the fields of cyber, national security, criminal and constitutional law. She also is a 2020-2021 New America Fellow. From 2009-2011, Daskal worked as the counsel to the Assistant Attorney General for National Security at the Department of Justice. Prior to joining DOJ, Daskal was senior counterterrorism counsel at Human Rights Watch, worked as a staff attorney for the Public Defender Service for the District of Columbia, and clerked for the Honorable Jed S. Rakoff. She also spent two years as a national security law fellow and adjunct professor at Georgetown Law Center. From 2016-2017, she was an Open Society Institute Fellow working on issues related to privacy and law enforcement access to data across borders.

Daskal’s scholarship has appeared in the Yale Law Journal, University of Pennsylvania Law Review, Vanderbilt Law Review, Stanford Law Review Online, and Harvard Journal of National Security Law, among other places. She published numerous op-eds, including in the New York Times, Washington Post, and The Atlantic and appeared has appeared on BBC, C-Span, MSNBC, and NPR, among other media outlets. She is an Executive Editor of the Just Security blog.

William C. Banks is a Syracuse University College of Law Board of Advisors Distinguished Professor and Emeritus Professor at the College of Law and the Maxwell School as Professor of Public Administration and International Affairs. During 2015-2016, Banks was Interim Dean of the College of Law. A teacher and scholar at SU for more than four decades, Banks was the Founding Director of the Institute for National Security and Counterterrorism (INSCT), now the Syracuse University Institute for Security Policy and Law (SPL). Under Banks’ leadership, INSCT/SPL grew from its inception in 2003 to become a recognized leader in interdisciplinary research and education on national and international security and terrorism.

A highly regarded and internationally recognized scholar, topics of Banks’ wide-ranging research include constitutional law and national security and counterterrorism law; laws of war and asymmetric warfare; drones and targeted killing; cybersecurity, cyberespionage, and cyber conflict; emergency powers; emergency preparedness and response; civilian-military relations; and government surveillance and privacy.

Banks is the author, co-author, and/or editor of numerous titles, including National Security Law (Wolters Kluwer, 2020) and Counterterrorism Law (Wolters Kluwer, 2020), as well as Counterinsurgency Law: New Directions in Asymmetric Warfare (Oxford UP, 2012) and New Battlefields/Old Laws: Critical Debates on Asymmetric Warfare (Columbia UP, 2011). He has also published more than 160 book chapters and articles range from the military use of unmanned aerial vehicles and the role of the military in domestic affairs, to cyberespionage, cyber attribution, and the FISA court.

Additionally, Banks spearheaded numerous interdisciplinary research projects for INSCT/SPL, including New Battlefields, Old Laws: From the Hague Conventions to Asymmetric Warfare; Controlling Economic Cyber Espionage; and Countering Foreign Terrorist Fighters, a collaboration with the United Nations Counter-Terrorism Committee Executive Directorate (UN CTED).

Banks joined the SU College of Law faculty in 1978. In 1998, he was appointed a Professor of Public Administration in SU’s Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, and he was named a Laura J. and L. Douglas Meredith Professor for Teaching Excellence in the same year. In 2008, Banks became the first College of Law Board of Advisors Distinguished Professor. In 2017, the SU Law Class of 2017 bestowed on Banks the Res Ipsa Loquitur Award at their Commencement ceremony, in recognition of his impact on their class both as a teacher and as Interim Dean. Also in 2017, Banks was named Senior Fellow at Georgetown Law’s Center on National Security and the Law.

Among his public service appointments, Banks has served as a Special Counsel to the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee (for the confirmation hearings of Supreme Court nominee Stephen G. Breyer); as a Member and Chair of the Advisory Committee of the ABA Standing Committee on Law and National Security; as a Member of the InfraGard National Members Alliance Board of Advisors; on the Advisory Council for the Perpetual Peace Project; on the Executive Board of the International Counter-Terrorism Academic Community (ICTAC); as an Editorial Board member at The International Centre for Counter-Terrorism in The Hague, The Netherlands; and as a Distinguished Fellow of the Institute for Veterans and Military Families at Syracuse University. Banks is Chair of the ABA Standing Committee on Law and National Security (August 2020-) and the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of National Security Law & Policy.