From "Portraits of DEF CON" by Eli Omen, licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0

Kurt Opsahl

EFF Special Counsel

Kurt Opsahl is the Associate General Counsel for Cybersecurity and Civil Liberties Policy for the Filecoin Foundation. Formerly, Opsahl was the Deputy Executive Director and General Counsel of EFF.  Opsahl was also the lead attorney on the Coders' Rights Project, and continues to assist EFF with that work.  Before joining EFF, Opsahl worked at Perkins Coie, where he represented technology clients with respect to intellectual property, privacy, defamation, and other online liability matters, including working on Kelly v. Arribasoft, MGM v. Grokster and CoStar v. LoopNet. For his work responding to government subpoenas, Opsahl is proud to have been called a "rabid dog" by the Department of Justice. Prior to Perkins, Opsahl was a research fellow to Professor Pamela Samuelson at the U.C. Berkeley School of Information Management & Systems. Opsahl received his law degree from Boalt Hall, and undergraduate degree from U.C. Santa Cruz. Opsahl co-authored "Electronic Media and Privacy Law Handbook." In 2007, Opsahl was named as one of the "Attorneys of the Year" by California Lawyer magazine for his work on the O'Grady v. Superior Court appeal. From 2014 to 2022, Opsahl served on the USENIX Board of Directors. Opsahl is a member of the CISA Cybersecurity Advisory Committee’s Technical Advisory Council.

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