We're just days away from celebrating EFF's 25th anniversary in San Francisco on Thursday, July 16. The day will start with a minicon examining the past, present, and future of digital rights and end with a great party. We hope you can

The minicon will take place at DNA Lounge from noon until four. It promises to be an afternoon full of interesting discussions and fun and educational activities shared with EFF staff, supporters, and digital rights experts. (To be sure you're viewing the most up-to-date minicon info, you may want to visit the calendar event page.)

Security Training

EFF Activist Nadia Kayyali will be on hand to provide practical privacy and security tips from 12:30-3, based on EFF's Surveillance Self-Defense project. Attendees will have two opportunities to go through threat modeling, with time for more hands-on tools and techniques discussions with Nadia and other EFF staff.

Capture The Flag

Throughout the minicon, we will be hosting our first ever "Capture the Flag" hacking contest! Anyone present at the minicon will be eligible to participate in our 4 hour contest. The challenges will include web hacking, binary analysis, cryptography challenges, and more. Participants should bring a laptop with linux or a virtual machine installed.

Panel Schedule

Each panel will be moderated by an expert working on the issue at EFF. Each panel will be followed by a Q&A session:

12:00 Welcome
12:30 Panel I: Digital Activism and the Future of the Web as a Public Space, featuring Trevor Timm, Sina Khanifar, Annalee Newitz, and Amie Stepanovich.
1:20 Break, discussion
1:40 Panel II: Copyright and User Control, featuring Pamela Samuelson and Michael Masnick, additional guests TBA
2:30 Break, discussion
2:50 Panel III: Privacy and Security: The Next 25 Years, featuring Parisa Tabriz, Alex Stamos, Morgan Marquis-Boire, Bruce Schneier, and Deepti Rohatgi.
3:40 Wrap-up and final discussion time

Speaker Bios

Sina Khanifar is a web developer and an advocate for better technology laws. Starting in 2013, he led the campaign to legalize cell phone unlocking, which culminated in action by both the FCC and Congress. In 2014 he helped lead development of EFF’s open source action center toolset, and has spent much of the last few years building tools to help Internet users reach out to their elected representatives. He continues to work actively on DMCA reform as a board member of the Digital Right to Repair Coalition, and is also the founder of Taskforce.is, a group of volunteer developers who helped organize and run a range of campaigns, including many that EFF has actively supported.

Morgan Marquis-Boire is a Senior Researcher at the Citizen Lab, University of Toronto. He is the Director of Security for First Look Media and a contributing writer for The Intercept. Prior to this, he worked on the security team at Google. He is a Special Advisor to the Electronic Frontier Foundation in San Francisco and an Advisor to the United Nations Interregional Crime and Justice Research Institute. In addition to this, he serves as a member of the Freedom of the Press Foundation advisory board and as an advisor to Amnesty International. He has lectured on security, surveillance, and nation-state espionage at Universities around the world including Harvard, MIT, Stanford, Toronto, and the University of Milan. His research has been featured in numerous print and online publications. In 2012, SC Magazine gave him an honorable mention as one of the influential minds of IT Security. He was named as one of Italian WIRED's 50 people of 2014. In March of 2015 he was named a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum.

Mike Masnick is the founder and editor of the Techdirt blog, covering a variety of topics around innovation, intellectual property, economics, business and policy. He is also the CEO of the new think tank, the Copia Institute, dedicated to working with the technology community to look for opportunities to drive innovation forward.

Deepti Rohatgi was most recently Head of Policy Lookout. Previously she served as a Senior Product Marketing Director at a cybersecurity company, a Policy Director at Yahoo!, Visiting Scholar at Stanford University and a Director of IT and Telecommunications Policy at the U.S. Department of State. In these roles Ms. Rohatgi worked to create the first mobile behavioral targeting opt-out and one of the first mobile short-form privacy policies. Ms. Rohatgi holds a Masters in Industrial Engineering and a B.A. in Public Policy from Stanford University.

Bruce Schneier is an internationally renowned security technologist, called a "security guru" by The Economist. He is the author of 12 books -- including the New York Times best-seller "Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World" -- as well as hundreds of articles, essays, and academic papers. His influential newsletter "Crypto-Gram" and blog "Schneier on Security" are read by over 250,000 people. Schneier is a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School, a program fellow at the New America Foundation's Open Technology Institute, a board member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and an Advisory Board member of the Electronic Privacy Information Center. He is also the Chief Technology Officer of Resilient Systems, Inc.

Alex Stamos is the Chief Security Officer of Facebook. Alex was previously the CISO of Yahoo, and the co-founder of iSEC Partners and founder of Artemis Internet, two companies that continue to make the Internet a safer place. Alex has spent his career building or improving secure, trustworthy systems, and is a noted expert in Internet infrastructure, cloud computing and mobile security. He is a frequently request speaker at conferences such as Black Hat, DEF CON, Amazon ZonCon, Microsoft Blue Hat, FS-ISAC and Infragard. He holds a BSEE from the University of California, Berkeley and his personal security writings are available at unhandled.com.

Amie Stepanovich is U.S. Policy Manager at Access. Amie is an expert in domestic surveillance, cybersecurity, and privacy law. At Access, Amie leads projects on digital due process and responds to threats at the intersection of human rights and communications surveillance. Previously, Ms. Stepanovich was the Director of the Domestic Surveillance Project at the Electronic Privacy Information Center, where she testified in hearings in both the Senate and the House of Representatives, as well as in State legislatures. She was co-chair for the 2014 Computers, Freedom, and Privacy Conference and is the Committee on Individual Rights and Responsibilities' Liason to the American Bar Association's Cybersecurity Working Group. Amie was named as a Privacy Ambassador by the Information and Privacy Commissioner of Ontario, Canada and was recognized in 2014 as one of Forbes magazine’s 30 under 30 leaders in Law and Policy. Stepanovich has a J.D. from New York Law School, and a B.S. from the Florida State University.

Parisa Tabriz has worked on information security for nearly a decade and as a (self-appointed) "Security Princess" of Google for the last 8+ years. She started as a "hired hacker" software engineer for Google's security team. As an engineer, she found and closed security holes in Google's products, and taught other engineers how to do the same. Today, Parisa manages Google's Chrome security engineering team, whose goal is to make Chrome the safest way to browse the web, and generally improve security on the Internet. She has the somewhat unique distinction of being featured by WIRED and ELLE in the same year and enjoys luring more people into infosec, making things, and climbing rocks.

Trevor Timm is the co-founder and executive director of Freedom of the Press Foundation. He also writes a twice-weekly column for the Guardian on privacy, free speech, and national security issues. From 2011-13, Trevor was an activist at EFF.

Minicon-only tickets are $25, and party-only tickets are $40. A ticket good for both events is available for $50, or $45 for current EFF members. Get your ticket today!

If you can’t make it and still want to help commemorate this milestone, please consider giving to the EFF25 membership drive, our campaign to add 2,500 new and renewing members before our anniversary celebration, ensuring digital rights have an advocate for years to come.

For more information, email membership@eff.org. We're looking forward to celebrating with you!