Simone Browne is Associate Professor in the Department of African and African Diaspora Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. Her first book, Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness (2015), examines surveillance with a focus on transatlantic slavery, biometrics, airports, and creative texts. Dark Matters was awarded the 2016 Lora Romero First Book Publication Prize by the American Studies Association, the 2016 Surveillance Studies Book Prize by the Surveillance Studies Network, and the 2015 Donald McGannon Award for Social and Ethical Relevance in Communications Technology Research. Browne is also a member of Deep Lab, a feminist collaborative composed of artists, engineers, hackers, writers, and theorists.

Jimena Canales is an award-winning author and expert in the history of physics. She is the author of Bedeviled: A Shadow History of Demons in Science (forthcoming Fall 2020), The Physicist and the Philosopher: Einstein, Bergson, and the Debate That Changed Our Understanding of Time, A Tenth of a Second: A History, and various essays published in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, NPR, and scholarly journals. She was an Assistant and Associate Professor at Harvard University and the Thomas M. Siebel professor for the History of Science at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign and currently lives in Boston.

David Danks is L.L. Thurstone Professor of Philosophy & Psychology, and Head of Philosophy, at Carnegie Mellon University, where he is the Chief Ethicist of the Block Center for Technology & Society; and co-director of the Center for Informed Democracy and Social Cybersecurity (IDeaS). He works on problems at the intersection of philosophy, cognitive science, and machine learning, such as the ethical, psychological, and policy issues around AI and robotics. Danks is the recipient of a James S. McDonnell Foundation Scholar Award, and an Andrew Carnegie Fellowship. He has a Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of California, San Diego.

Ben Wizner is the director of the ACLU’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project. For nearly two decades, he has worked at the intersection of civil liberties and national security, litigating numerous cases involving airport security policies, government watch lists, surveillance practices, targeted killing, and torture. He appears regularly in the global media, has testified before Congress, and is an adjunct professor at New York University School of Law. Since July of 2013, he has been the principal legal advisor to NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. Wizner is a graduate of New York University School of Law and was a law clerk to the Hon. Stephen Reinhardt of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.

Trevor Paglen is an artist whose work spans image-making, sculpture, investigative journalism, writing, and numerous other disciplines. Among his chief concerns are learning how to see the historical moment we live in and developing the means to imagine alternative futures. Paglen’s work is included in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Victoria and Albert Museum, London, amongst others. He has launched an artwork into distant orbit around Earth in collaboration with Creative Time and MIT, contributed research and cinematography to the Academy Award-winning film Citizenfour, and created a radioactive public sculpture for the exclusion zone in Fukushima, Japan.