Advisory Board
Thomas Drake
Whistleblower, former Senior Executive at the National Security Agency
Thomas Drake is a former senior executive at the National Security Agency. While there he blew the whistle on 9/11 intelligence failures, massive multi-billion fraud, waste and abuse as well as a secret mass surveillance regime authorized by President Bush that violated the Constitution. The latter resulted in Mr. Drake indicted under the draconian Espionage Act facing decades in prison. He went free in a plea deal. Prior to NSA he was a consultant/contractor and boutique dot com principal in management and information technology. He also served as an enlisted aircrew member in the Air Force and as a commissioned intelligence officer in the Navy across some 15 years and a short stint as an intelligence analyst at the CIA. He has dedicated the rest of his life to defending our rights, personal privacy and the pursuit of all things good in humanity against the abuse of power.
Jesselyn Radack
Head of the Whistleblower and Source Protection Program (WHISPeR) at ExposeFacts.
Jesselyn Radack heads the Whistleblower and Source Protection Program (WHISPeR) at ExposeFacts. Radack has been at the forefront of challenging the U.S. government’s unprecedented war on whistleblowers, which has become a war on journalists. Radack has represented dozens of national security employees who have been prosecuted under the Espionage Act for allegedly mishandling classified information, including Daniel Hale, Edward Snowden, Thomas Drake, and John Kiriakou.
Ms. Radack has testified before the U.S. Congress, European Parliament, Council of Europe and Germany’s Bundestag. The author of TRAITOR: The Whistleblower & the “American Taliban,” Ms. Radack has written prominent opinion pieces and academic articles, and was named one of Foreign Policy magazine’s “Leading Global Thinkers of 2013.”
Alexa Koenig
Co-Faculty Director and Adjunct Professor, Human Rights Center, University of California, Berkeley School of Law
Alexa Koenig, JD, MA, PhD, is an adjunct professor at the University of California, Berkeley, where she teaches classes on the impact of new and emerging technologies on human rights, and co-faculty director of Berkeley’s Human Rights Center (winner of the 2015 MacArthur Award for Creative and Effective Institutions). She co-founded and directs the Investigations Lab, which trains students and professionals to use digital open source information to strengthen accountability for violations of international criminal, human rights and humanitarian law. She is a member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s Committee on Scientific Freedom and Responsibility and has served on the University of California’s Presidential Working Group on Artificial Intelligence, among other posts. Her most recent book is Graphic: Trauma and Meaning in our Online Lives (Cambridge University Press in 2023).
Khalil Dewan
Head of Legal Investigations at Stoke White, PhD Candidate in Law at SOAS, University of London.
Khalil Dewan is Head of Legal Investigations at Stoke White law firm, and a PhD Candidate in Law at SOAS, University of London. His experience includes advising NATO's Counter Improvised Explosive Devices Centre of Excellence (C-IED COE), US Military Commission Trials, and assisting ICC and Universal Jurisdiction submissions related to international law. He has conducted field research on US, UK and France’s Drone Warfare in Syria, Somalia, and Mali. Personnel from the US Air Force (USAF) and British Royal Air Force (RAF) have been interviewed by him. Expert Evidence was requested from Khalil by the UK All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on Drones and Modern Conflict. The US Army War College Quarterly and Oxford Research Group have also cited his works. Khalil holds an LLM in International Law focusing on US drone targeting.
Andreas Schüller
Director of the International Crimes and Accountability program at the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights (ECCHR)
Andreas Schüller is the director of the International Crimes and Accountability program at the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights (ECCHR). Since 2009, he has worked at ECCHR on such issues as drone strikes, the US torture program, abuses committed by British soldiers in Iraq, as well as international crimes in Syria, Sri Lanka, Colombia and the Ukraine. In publications and lectures, he focuses on international criminal law and the protection of human rights from a critical, civil-society perspective. He studied law in Trier, Germany, and Orléans, France, received his LL.M. from the Universiteit Leiden, Netherlands, with an emphasis in international criminal law, and is licensed to practice law in Berlin.
Jennifer Gibson
Legal Director of the Whistleblower Protection Program at The Signals Network
Jennifer Gibson is the Legal Director of the Whistleblower Protection Program at The Signals Network. Jennifer is a US lawyer with over fifteen years’ experience investigating, litigating, and advocating on human rights.
Most recently, she worked for Reprieve, where she led the organization’s work on extrajudicial killings carried out under the guise of national security. She worked closely with civilian victims of drone strikes in Pakistan, Yemen, Libya, and elsewhere, investigating their cases to secure accountability. Her work involved litigation before both domestic and international courts, as well as public and political advocacy aimed at holding powerful governments and corporations accountable for their roles in the abuses.
Theresa Züger
Head of the AI & Society Lab and Lead of the research group for Public Interest AI at the Alexander von Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society
Theresa Züger is head of the Public Interest AI research group funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF). The group is concerned with the question of how AI can serve the public interest and which technical and social criteria must be fulfilled for this to happen. She is also lead of the AI & Society Lab, launched by HIIG in 2020. Previously, she headed the office of the Third Engagement Report from the Federal Government on behalf of the Federal Ministry for Family Affairs, Senior Citizens, Women and Youth (BMFSFJ), which focuses on the digitalization of civic engagement. For the Medienanstalt Berlin-Brandenburg, she developed and managed the Media Policy Lab.
In 2017, Theresa received her PhD in Media Studies from the Humboldt University of Berlin and she was a Research Fellow at the Center for Advanced Internet Studies. In 2016, she curated and moderated for transmediale festival. In 2013 she was a Visiting Researcher at the Berkeley Center for New Media at the University of California, Berkeley. She is part of the scientific council of the Acatech TechnikRadar and a member of the commission of the Digital Transformation Think Tank of the German Caritas Association.
Matthias Monroy
Editor of the German civil rights journal Bürgerrechte & Polizei/CILIP and nd.Der Tag, DE.
Matthias Monroy is the editor of the German civil rights journal Bürgerrechte & Polizei/CILIP and nd.Der Tag. After witnessing and experiencing military and police repression in the 1990’s, Monroy focuses on policing in the European Union, migration control, internet monitoring, surveillance and interception technologies, police gadgets, satellite intelligence and drones. He has written for several newspapers and online-media like netzpolitik.org.
Anthony Downey
Professor of Visual Culture in the Middle East and North Africa, Birmingham City University, UK.
Anthony Downey is Professor of Visual Culture in the Middle East and North Africa (Birmingham City University), where his research focuses on cultural production in the Middle East and Global South, practice-based research and digital methodologies, and the politics of Artificial Intelligence (AI). He sits on the editorial boards of Third Text (Routledge), Digital War (Palgrave Macmillan), Memory, Mind & Media (Cambridge University Press), and is the series editor for Research/Practice (Sternberg Press, 2019–ongoing). From 2020, Downey has been the Cultural Lead on a four-year multi-disciplinary AHRC Network Plus award, which is designed to support collaborative cultural practices and the expansion of educational provision for people with disabilities in Lebanon, the occupied Palestinian territories, and Jordan. Recent and upcoming publications include Trevor Paglen: Adversarial Hallucinations (Sternberg Press & MIT, 2024); Khalil Rabah: Falling Forward—Works 1995- 2025 (Sharjah Art Foundation and Hatje Cantz, 2023); and Shona Illingworth: Topologies of Air (Sternberg Press & The Power Plant, 2022). In 2025, he will publish Decolonising Vision: Algorithmic Anxieties and the Future of Warfare.
