Kevin Bankston is the Director of the Open Technology Institute and Co-Director of the Cybersecurity Initiative at New America, where he works in the public interest to promote policy reforms that foster open and secure communications networks, platforms, and technologies. Prior to joining OTI, Kevin was a Senior Counsel and the Director of the Free Expression Project at the Center for Democracy & Technology, which he joined after working for nearly a decade at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, where he specialized in free speech and privacy law with a focus on government surveillance, Internet privacy, and location privacy. As a Senior Staff Attorney at EFF, he regularly litigated issues surrounding free expression and electronic surveillance, and was a lead counsel in EFF's lawsuits against the National Security Agency and AT&T, challenging the legality of the NSA warrantless wiretapping program first revealed in 2005. Before joining EFF, he litigated Internet-related free speech cases at the national office of the American Civil Liberties Union in New York City as a Justice William Brennan First Amendment Fellow. He received his JD at the University of Southern California Law School after receiving his BA at the University of Texas at Austin.
