Daniel Ellsberg
Daniel Ellsberg is a co-founder of the Freedom of the Press Foundation. He is best known as the whistleblower who gave the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times in 1971. Ellsberg is also the author of three books: Papers on the War (1971), Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers (2002), and Risk, Ambiguity and Decision (2001). In December 2006, he won the Right Livelihood Award, known as the “Alternative Nobel Prize,” in Stockholm, Sweden, “for putting peace and truth first, at considerable personal risk, and dedicating his life to inspiring others to follow his example.”
Glenn Greenwald
Glenn Greenwald is a lawyer, journalist, blogger, and author. He worked as a constitutional and civil rights litigator before becoming a contributor to Salon, and now writes for The Guardian about civil liberties issues. He is the author of three New York Times bestselling books, including his latest, With Liberty and Justice for Some. Greenwald was named by The Atlantic as one of the 25 most influential political commentators in the nation. He was the recipient of the first annual I.F. Stone Award for Independent Journalism, and won the 2010 Online Journalism Association Award for his investigative work on the arrest and oppressive detention of Bradley Manning.
John Cusack
John Cusack is an actor, director, producer, and screenwriter who has appeared in over 60 films. He's also a political activist and regularly speaks out and writes on issues of human rights, government transparency, and accountability—amongst other things.
John Perry Barlow
John Perry Barlow is co-founder of the Freedom of the Press Foundation. He is also a retired Wyoming rancher (and native), a former lyricist for the Grateful Dead, and the co-founder and board member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a civil liberties organization which has been protecting the free flow of information on the Internet since 1990. He was a founding Fellow at Harvard Law School's Berkman Center for Internet and Society. He has been writing about Cyberspace since 1988 and was first to apply that name to the global social space it presently describes. Barlow's piece on the future of copyright, “The Economy of Ideas,” is taught in many law schools, and his “Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace” is posted on thousands of websites. Recently, The Guardian named him one of the twenty most influential champions of the Open Internet. He is presently engaged in starting a company, Algae Systems, that aspires to turn sewage into carbon negative jet fuel. He is the father of three daughters and his primary aspiration is to be a good ancestor. He dreams of a world where all general useful knowledge can be available to anyone, of any station, merely for the price of curiosity.
Josh Stearns
Josh Stearns is a journalist and organizer working for press freedom and the future of news through media and tech policy. As the Journalism and Public Media Campaign Director at Free Press, Stearns runs national advocacy campaigns to amplify the voice of local people in the policy debates that shape our media. Since 2011 he has been tracking journalist arrests and press suppression across the US, an effort the earned him “Storify of the Year” and the Lew Hill Media Ally Award for his use of cutting-edge technology and First Amendment advocacy. His articles have appeared in Mother Jones, Orion Magazine, Yes Magazine and the Columbia Journalism Review.
Laura Poitras
Laura Poitras is a documentary filmmaker. Her 2003 film Flag Wars won a Peabody Award. Her 2006 film My Country, My Country was nominated for an Academy Award. Her 2010 film The Oath was nominated for an Emmy Award for outstanding investigative journalism. She is currently working on a documentary about state surveillance, WikiLeaks, Internet freedom, and whistleblowers. She is the recipient of a 2012 MacArthur Fellowship. Her work was included in the 2012 Whitney Biennial.
She has been detained and interrogated about her work at the U.S. border over 40 times.
Rainey Reitman
Rainey Reitman is a co-founder and chief operating officer of Freedom of the Press Foundation. She's also a founder and steering committee member for the Bradley Manning Support Network, a network of individuals and organizations advocating for the release of accused WikiLeaks whistleblower Pfc. Bradley Manning. She serves on the board of the directors for the Bill of Rights Defense Committee, a nonprofit whose mission is to organize and support an effective, national grassroots movement to restore civil liberties, and on the steering committee for the Internet Defense League, which organizes Internet users to combat imminent threats to online rights. Reitman is also Activism Director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
Trevor Timm
Trevor Timm is a co-founder and the executive director of the Freedom of the Press Foundation. He is a writer, activist, and lawyer who specializes in free speech and government transparency issues. He has contributed to The Atlantic, Al Jazeera, Foreign Policy, The Guardian, Harvard Law and Policy Review and PBS MediaShift. He currently works as an activist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Previously, Timm helped the longtime General Counsel of The New York Times, James Goodale, write a book on the First Amendment.
Xeni Jardin
Xeni Jardin is a founding partner and co-editor of award winning blog Boing Boing. Executive Producer and host of Webby-honored "Boing Boing Video," online and in-flight on Virgin America. Has contributed to such diverse venues as NPR, Wired, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, The Guardian, and a frequently-sought tech expert in broadcast news.