About the AuthorS

James X. Dempsey

Jim Dempsey is senior policy advisor to the Stanford Program on Geopolitics, Technology and Governance, a lecturer at the UC Berkeley School of Law, where he teaches a course on cybersecurity law in the LLM program, and a judge on the Data Protection Review Court in the US Department of Justice.

In 2012, after Senate confirmation, he was appointed by President Barack Obama as a member of the US Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, an independent agency within the federal government charged with overseeing the nation’s counterterrorism programs. He served in that position until January 2017. Other experience includes Executive Director of the Berkeley Center for Law & Technology; leadership roles at the Center for Democracy & Technology (CDT), a non-profit public policy organization focused on privacy and other issues affecting the internet; and assistant counsel to the House Judiciary Committee. Jim began his legal career at Arnold & Porter, after clerking for the Hon. Robert Braucher, Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court.

Jim’s other publications include Bulk Collection: Systematic Government Access to Private-Sector Data (ed., with Fred H. Cate) (Oxford, 2017). He writes on cybersecurity issues for Lawfare.

John P. Carlin 

John Carlin served as a top-level official in both Republican and Democratic administrations, including as the Acting Deputy Attorney General of the United States, as Assistant Attorney General for National Security at the U.S. Department of Justice, as the Chief of Staff of the FBI, as the National Coordinator of the Computer Hacking and Intellectual Property (CHIP) program, and as a senior career federal prosecutor. 

Over the course of his career in government, John supervised all aspects of the Department and was a key architect in developing the DOJ’s strategy on cyber-crime and headed the ransomware taskforce.

A partner at the law firm Paul, Weiss, he serves as a practice chair and is the founding chair of the Aspen Institute’s Cyber Security & Technology Program. John is co-author of Dawn of the Code War: America’s Battle Against Russia, China, and the Rising Global Cyber Threat.

Banner photo: “The Allegory of Good Government," by Ambrogio Lorenzetti, 1338, Museo Civico, Siena, (c) Erik Törner, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.

Dempsey photo: Jim McAuley, www.jimmcauleyphoto.com.