Domestic surveillance on foreign shores: The case of Microsoft’s servers in Ireland

Speaker Biographies

Bryan Cunningham is a senior adviser to the Chertoff Group. He is an information security and privacy lawyer who served previously in senior intelligence and law enforcement positions in the US government, most recently as deputy legal adviser to then-National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice. He is a principal in the law firm of Cunningham Levy LLP. In his position at the White House, Mr. Cunningham drafted significant portions of the National Strategy to Secure Cyberspace and the Homeland Security Act, as well as executive orders on terrorism, intelligence, and other terrorism-related policy documents. He was also one of the primary White House attorneys working with the 9/11 Commission. He served six years in the Clinton administration as a senior CIA officer and federal prosecutor. He is the principal author of legal and ethics chapters in multiple authoritative textbooks and is one of the only private-sector attorneys certified in the National Security Agency Information Security Assurance Methodology. Mr. Cunningham was founding vice-chair of the American Bar Association Cybersecurity Privacy Task Force and was awarded the National Intelligence Medal of Achievement for his work on information issues.

Jennifer Daskal joined American University Washington College of Law (WCL) in 2013 as an assistant professor of law. She teaches and writes in the fields of criminal law, national security law, and constitutional law. From 2009 to 2011, she was counsel to the assistant attorney general for national security at the Department of Justice (DOJ) and, among other things, served on the secretary of defense and attorney general–led Detention Policy Task Force. Before joining DOJ, she was the 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 spent two years before joining WCL’s faculty as a national security law fellow and adjunct professor at Georgetown Law Center. Ms. Daskal has published op-eds in The New York Times, The Washington Post, International Herald Tribune, Los Angeles Times, and Salon.com, and she has appeared on BBC, C-Span, CNN, MSNBC, and NPR, among other media outlets. She is founding editor of and regular contributor to the recently launched Just Security blog.

Viet Dinh is the founding partner of Bancroft PLLC. A leading expert on corporate governance and regulatory compliance, he has counseled corporations and their leaders on a range of transactional and governance issues. He also advises individuals and organizations through high-stakes conflicts, existential risk, and national security issues. He is also professorial lecturer in law and distinguished lecturer in government at Georgetown University, where he specializes in corporations and constitutional law. He served as US assistant attorney general for legal policy from 2001 to 2003, where he played a key role in developing legal policy initiatives to combat terrorism, including the Patriot Act. Mr. Dinh clerked for US Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor and for DC Circuit Judge Laurence H. Silberman. He graduated magna cum laude from Harvard College and Harvard Law School, where he was a class marshal and an Olin research fellow in law and economics. Bancroft serves as counsel to Microsoft, but the views Mr. Dinh expresses at this event are solely his own.

Laura R. Handman cochairs the appellate practice of Davis Wright Tremaine LLP. For more than 30 years, she has provided counseling and litigation services to US and foreign publishers and broadcasters in content-related matters. Ms. Handman submitted an amicus on behalf of 29 US and foreign organizations in support of Microsoft’s challenge to the search warrant for emails in one of Microsoft’s servers in Ireland. In the last two years, she obtained dismissal of libel suits brought by a Liberian war lord, a former Russian diplomat who forms off-shore shell companies, an author challenging Obama’s birth certificate, an antigay rock singer, the “Number One Dirtiest Hotel in the US” (as ranked by Trip Advisor, a New York state judge, and a lawyer challenging his review on Yelp. On behalf of The Wall Street Journal, she obtained a decision in 2013 vacating a 34-year-old injunction that blocked the US government from releasing the database containing what doctors earn from Medicare. The Wall Street Journal won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for the series based on the first-time release of this data. She obtained the first federal court decisions applying the DC Anti-SLAPP law and obtained the first decisions refusing to enforce foreign libel judgments as inconsistent with the First Amendment, which led to the unanimous passage of the SPEECH Act. She has represented reporters alleged to have received information in two recent Espionage Act prosecutions. Before private practice, Ms. Handman was an assistant United States attorney in the Eastern District of New York.

Gregory Nojeim is a senior counsel and director of the Freedom, Security, and Technology Project at the Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT). He is a recognized expert on the Patriot Act; the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act; the Electronic Communications Privacy Act; and the application of the Fourth Amendment to electronic surveillance in the national security, intelligence, and criminal arenas. He is the lead strategist for CDT’s cybersecurity work, often testifying in both the House and Senate on the impact of cybersecurity proposals on privacy, civil liberties, and technology innovation. Mr. Nojeim sits on the board of directors of the Global Network Initiative and is a member of the Department of Homeland Security Data Privacy and Integrity Advisory Committee. As cochair of the Coordinating Committee on National Security and Civil Liberties of the American Bar Association’s (ABA) Section on Individual Rights and Responsibilities, he was one of the lead drafters of the ABA’s 2007 policy on the state secrets privilege. Before joining CDT in 2007, he was the associate director and chief legislative counsel of the ACLU’s Washington Legislative Office. Mr. Nojeim also served for four years as the director of legal services of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC) and conducted much of ADC’s work on immigration, civil rights, and human rights. He was an attorney with the Washington, DC, law firm Kirkpatrick & Lockhart (now K&L Gates) where he specialized in mergers and acquisitions, securities law, and international trade.

Shane Tews is a visiting fellow at AEI’s Center for Internet, Communications, and Technology Policy, where she works primarily on cybersecurity and Internet governance issues. She is also the chief policy officer at 463 Communications, a firm that advises high-tech organizations on Internet policies. Ms. Tews dealt with Internet security and domain issues as vice president of global policy for Verisign Inc. She is currently vice-chair of the board of directors of the Internet Education Foundation, a nonprofit organization whose mission is to promote a decentralized global Internet. She began her career on Capitol Hill as a legislative director for a member of Congress and worked in the George H. W. Bush White House, in the Office of Cabinet Affairs and at the US Department of Transportation. Ms. Tews studied communications at Arizona State University and at American University, where she graduated with a bachelor’s degree in general studies with an emphasis on communications and political science.