What News Organizations Need to Know About Protecting Journalist from Harassment

Nabiha Syed is an American media and technology lawyer. She has been described as "one of the best emerging free speech lawyers" by Forbes magazine. A Marshall Scholar, Syed co-founded the Media Freedom and Information Access legal clinic at Yale Law School, of which she is a graduate and a visiting fellow. Currently, she handles libel, privacy, and newsgathering matters at BuzzFeed, a global media company.

Prior to BuzzFeed, Syed was the First Amendment Fellow at The New York Times. Syed also serves as adjunct faculty at Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, and as the Vice Chair of the Student Press Law Center. She and her work have been featured in Slate, Cosmopolitan, and the Yale Law Journal. In 2016, she was named as a "40 Under 40 Rising Star" by the New York Law Journal.

Summer Lopez has served as PEN America’s senior director of Free Expression Programs since November, 2017. She previously worked for the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) for eight years, and was most recently posted to Zimbabwe, where she served as the Deputy Director of the Office of Democracy, Human Rights, and Governance at the USAID Mission in Harare. Earlier, she was at USAID headquarters in Washington, D.C., focused on the Middle East and Asia in the Center of Excellence on Democracy, Human Rights, and Governance. In that position she played a leading role in advocating for effective integration and promotion of democratic and human rights principles in U.S. policy, strategy, and programming in the Middle East and Asia, including during the period of the Arab Spring. She also represented USAID in the development of the first U.S. National Action Plan on Women, Peace, and Security, issued in 2011.

Before entering government, Lopez was the Vice President of Operations at The AjA Project, a nonprofit organization that provides media-based programs for refugee, displaced, and immigrant youth in the U.S. and internationally. In addition to Zimbabwe, she has lived and worked in Egypt, Ghana, India, and Nepal. She holds a BA in English and American Literature and Language from Harvard and a Master in Public Affairs from the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton.

Jason Reich is the Director of Global Security at BuzzFeed, inc. Before joining BuzzFeed, Mr. Reich led a team of crisis response experts working in the MENA region. Mr. Reich is consulted regularly as a subject matter expert on issues of information security, online harassment, and other media safety programs.

Helen O’Reilly is an associate in the Firm’s Litigation department. From 2012 to 2013, Ms. O’Reilly served as a law clerk to the Hon. John Gleeson of the United States District Court for the Eastern District of New York, and from 2011 to 2012, she served as a law clerk to the Hon. Barrington Parker of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.

In 2017 and 2018, Ms. O’Reilly was named among the Irish Legal 100. This list, published annually since 2008 by the Irish Voice newspaper, is a compilation of some of the most distinguished and accomplished men and women of Irish heritage in the legal profession in the United States.

Leigh has more than a decade of experience in computer security incident response. Prior to co-founding Tall Poppy, she was a Technology Fellow at the ACLU’s Project on Speech, Privacy, and Technology. Her industry career included running security incident response at Slack, protecting infrastructure running a million apps at Salesforce.com, shipping patches for billions of computers on a monthly basis at Microsoft, and analyzing malware at Symantec. Leigh has a Bachelor of Science from the University of Toronto where she majored in Computer Science and Equity Studies, and is a frequent keynote speaker at security and software conferences around the world.