Kurt is an attorney with Ridder, Costa, and Johnstone, a boutique technology law firm. Kurt has worked for close to 30 years on technology law and policy, representing startups since the early days of the first dot-com boom. He helped shape the law on fair use, free expression, and online privacy and to establish and defend code as speech. Through impact litigation, amicus briefs, and policy work, Kurt helped develop precedent and policy on key laws including Section 230, the DMCA, ECPA, National Security Letters, and the CFAA. His work has helped establish best practices for online service providers and supported privacy-enhancing technologies, security researchers, open-source projects, and the decentralized web.

From 2004 to 2023, Kurt served at the Electronic Frontier Foundation as Deputy Executive Director and General Counsel, helping defend rights online. At EFF, he was also the lead attorney on the Coders' Rights Project, which defends coders and security researchers, and he continues to assist EFF as a volunteer Special Counsel. In 2007, Kurt was named one of the "Attorneys of the Year" by California Lawyer magazine for his work establishing the reporter's privilege for online journalists.

From 2023 to 2026, Kurt served as Associate General Counsel for Cybersecurity and Civil Liberties Policy, and subsequently General Counsel, of the Filecoin Foundation, supporting the decentralized web and blockchain technologies as they navigated regulatory and policy spaces.

Prior to his time at EFF, Kurt practiced at Perkins Coie, representing technology clients on intellectual property, privacy, defamation, and other online liability matters, including high-profile cases such as Kelly v. Arribasoft, MGM v. Grokster, and CoStar v. LoopNet. While at Perkins Coie, he co-authored the Electronic Media and Privacy Law Handbook. Before Perkins Coie, Kurt was a research fellow for Professor Pamela Samuelson at the U.C. Berkeley School of Information. He earned his law degree from Berkeley Law, where he served on both the California Law Review and the Berkeley Technology Law Journal.

Kurt is a frequent speaker on technology law and policy, having presented at major industry conferences worldwide including DEF CON, the Chaos Communication Congress, Black Hat, RSA, BSides (Las Vegas and San Francisco), ShmooCon, the Electronic Frontiers Forum, and the Cypherpunk Congress.

Beyond his speaking and active practice, Kurt serves in several key leadership and advisory roles across the privacy, security, and digital rights ecosystems. He is currently President of the Board for both the Security Research Legal Defense Fund and the Financial Privacy Foundation, as well as a member of the Open Archive Advisory Board and the Zcash Community Advisory Panel. He previously served on the USENIX Board from 2014 to 2022, and on CISA’s Cybersecurity Advisory Committee’s Technical Advisory Council from 2022 to 2025.