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Jennifer Granick
Position / Title:
American Spies
jennifer at law dot stanford dot edu
Focus Areas:
Crypto Policy Project
Government Hacking
Jennifer Granick fights for civil liberties in an age of massive surveillance and powerful digital technology. As the new surveillance and cybersecurity counsel with the ACLU's Speech, Privacy and Technology Project, she litigates, speaks, and writes about privacy, security, technology, and constitutional rights. Granick is the author of the book American Spies: Modern Surveillance, Why You Should Care, and What To Do About It, published by Cambridge Press and winner of the 2016 Palmer Civil Liberties Prize.
Granick spent much of her career helping create Stanford Law School's Center for Internet and Society. From 2001 to 2007, she was Executive Director of CIS and founded the Cyberlaw Clinic, where she supervised students in working on some of the most important cyberlaw cases that took place during her tenure. For example, she was the primary crafter of a 2006 exception to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act which allows mobile telephone owners to legally circumvent the firmware locking their device to a single carrier. From 2012 to 2017, Granick was Civil Liberties Director specializing in and teaching surveillance law, cybersecurity, encryption policy, and the Fourth Amendment. In that capacity, she has published widely on U.S. government surveillance practices, and helped educate judges and congressional staffers on these issues. Granick also served as the Civil Liberties Director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation from 2007-2010. Earlier in her career, Granick spent almost a decade practicing criminal defense law in California.
Granick's work is well-known in privacy and security circles. Her keynote, "Lifecycle of a Revolution" for the 2015 Black Hat USA security conference electrified and depressed the audience in equal measure. In March of 2016, she received Duo Security's Women in Security Academic Award for her expertise in the field as well as her direction and guidance for young women in the security industry. Senator Ron Wyden (D-Ore) has called Granick an "NBA all-star of surveillance law."
High Res Photo of Jennifer Granick
Photo credit: Michael Sugrue
Government Threats To The Internet: Commentary on the Drummond Talk
By Jennifer Granick on February 24, 2014 at 6:00 am
The Internet is under threat, mostly from governments. We need companies to help people stand up to government threats, but companies cannot solve the problems for us. This is what I told the audience on Thursday, at an event co-hosted by CIS and the Program on Liberation Technology.
Eight Questions On Mass Surveillance For The PCLOB
By Jennifer Granick on February 11, 2014 at 12:22 pm
Tomorrow, all five members of the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (PCLOB) will testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee about their recent report concluding that the National Security Agency's (NSA) bulk collection of phone records under section 215 is illegal and ill-advised. Meanwhile, the PCLOB is gearing up to report in a few months its conclusions regarding mass surveillance of the content of Internet transactions under section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act
CIS & The Day We Fight Back
Today, Stanford's Center for Internet and Society joins Greenpeace, Mozilla, Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Libertarian Party, and an array of ideologically diverse groups in The Day We Fight Back against mass surveillance.
Reforming 702: Does NSA Minimize Cloud Files?
By Jennifer Granick on January 31, 2014 at 1:23 pm
Yesterday, I wrote generally about the problems with section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act (FAA). Today I focus on categories of information—including content—that NSA collects under section 702 but maybe never minimizes—meaning one of the few safeguards for U.S. person privacy is non-existent. In short, since the thirteen-page 702 minimization procedures only apply to communications, and since today's NSA probably excludes unshared cloud-stored data from the definition of communications, it's possible no minimization rules apply to protect American privacy.
Time to Reform the FISA Amendments Act Section 702
I've written a lot about the problems with the FISA Amendments Act and section 702, which is the legal basis for the PRISM surveillance program and involves warrantless collection of communications contents via targeting non-U.S. individuals or entities reasonably believed to be located abroad.
Important FAA Amendments Need Public Support
Motion to Unseal Court Records Concerning US DOJ Motion to Compel Facebook
Encryption helps human rights workers, activists, journalists, financial institutions, innovative businesses, and governments protect the confidentiality, integrity, and economic value of their activities. However, strong encryption may mean that governments cannot make sense of data they would otherwise be able to lawfully access in a criminal or intelligence investigation.
In Re: Petition of Jennifer Granick and Riana Pfefferkorn
Jennifer Granick and Riana Pfefferkorn are petitioning the federal court for the Northern District of California to unseal years' worth of sealed surveillance matters filed in that court.
U.S. v. Auernheimer
Arguing that a defendant's conviction for website hacking should be overturned because legitimate, highly valuable security and privacy research commonly employs techniques that are essentially identical to what the defendant did and that such independent research is of great value to academics, government regulators and the public even when – often especially when — conducted without a website owner's permission.
Apple v. FBI
Arguing that if the court should not compel Apple to create software to enable unlocking and search of the San Bernardino shooter's iPhone, it will jeopardize digital and personal security more generally.
Shloss v. Estate of Joyce
After the Estate of James Joyce refused to allow a scholar to quote Joyce in her book, we successfully defended her right under the fair use doctrine to use the quotes she needed to illustrate her scholarship. After we prevailed in the case, the Estate paid $240,000 of our client's legal fees.
Opening Brief to the Ninth Circuit re Motion to Unseal (Facebook Messenger)
Riana Pfefferkorn
Opening brief of Movants-Appellants EFF, ACLU, and Riana Pfefferkorn to the Ninth Circuit in our appeal from the district court's denial of our motion to unseal filings in a sealed case wherein the Department of Justice allegedly sought to compel Facebook to comply with a wiretap order for Facebook's end-to-end encrypted voice calling app, Messenger.
Our Cars Are Now Roving Computers. Is The Fourth Amendment Ready?
Our cars don't just take us from point A to point B anymore. They now play our favorite Spotify playlists, read us our text messages, and make phone calls. They may collect audio and video inside and outside a car as well as GPS-coordinates.
Amicus Brief in Mobley v. State
Brief of amici curiae ACLU, ACLU of Georgia, and Riana Pfefferkorn in support of appellant Victor Mobley in Mobley v. State, a Georgia Supreme Court case presenting the question of whether the Fourth Amendment requires a warrant for the seizure of digital data stored by a vehicle -- specifically, a car's event data recorder (EDR).
Reply in Support of Objections to Report and Recommendation
Reply brief in support of January 2019 objections to magistrate judge's report and recommendation.
Objections to Magistrate Judge's Report and Recommendation
Objections to Magistrate Judge's Report and Recommendation to deny the Petition, plus supporting documents (supporting declaration of Jennifer Granick, administrative motion, proposed orders).
YouTube reversal bans Holocaust hoaxers, stops pay for borderline creators
""YouTube as a private company is well within its rights," said Jennifer Granick, a speech and technology expert at the American Civil Liberties Union. But "YouTube will make mistakes, and over-censor.""
Facebook is still letting border militias organize on its platform
The Daily Dot
"Jennifer Granick, a surveillance and cybersecurity counsel with the ACLU, explains that the purpose of the law "isn't necessarily to protect the tech companies, but to protect the American people in having a platform where you can post information and post our stories, because if the platforms were liable for information that their users publish, then they wouldn't be able to publish that information. They would have to go through some kind of advanced review process.""
Judge Denies Petition to Unseal 13 Years of Government Surveillance Records
"In a Stanford CIS blog post, Pfefferkorn said she found hope in the opinion. "For one, the court rejected the government's unfounded attempt to argue that we lack standing to seek to unseal these records at all," she wrote. "It is well-established that members of the public have standing to seek to unseal sealed court records, and the court refused to depart from that settled law.
Client in Robert Kraft sex spa case sues over video, says civil rights violated
"Jennifer Granick, surveillance and cybersecurity counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union, told USA TODAY Sports that delayed-notice warrants often lack guidelines to protect bystanders caught during surveillance under a provision of the Patriot Act.
Tracking Phones, Google Is a Dragnet for the Police
""Normally we think of the judiciary as being the overseer, but as the technology has gotten more complex, courts have had a harder and harder time playing that role," said Jennifer Granick, surveillance and cybersecurity counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union. "We're depending on companies to be the intermediary between people and the government.""
Information Security Summitt (Past Event)
Jennifer Granick, Director of Civil Liberties, will speaking at the ISSA-LA Summitt.
More information: https://issalasummit9.wpengine.com/?page_id=285/#Granick
Title: American Spies, Modern Surveillance, and You
Session Description:
Air Mozilla: American Spies: Modern Surveillance and What We Can Do Speaker: Jennifer Granick (Past Event)
SFO Commons
Intelligence agencies in the U.S. (aka the American Spies) are exceedingly aggressive, pushing and sometimes bursting through the technological, legal and political boundaries of lawful surveillance.
TEDx Stanford - Seize the Moment: Jennifer Granick (Past Event)
CEMEX Auditorium
CIS Director of Civil Liberties Jennifer Granick will talk about the ideas in her book American Spies with other panelists at the TEDx Stanford Seize the Moment Session.
View full TEDx Stanford program.
More info about Jennifer Granick.
Modern Surveillance Under the Trump Administration (Past Event)
NYU Washington Center
Join Just Security for a fireside chat on the current state of U.S. surveillance and a celebration of Jennifer Granick's new book, American Spies: Modern Surveillance, Why You Should Care, And What to Do About It. Opening remarks by Senator Ron Wyden.
American Spies - Modern Surveillance, Why You Should Care, And What to Do About It (Past Event)
US intelligence agencies - the eponymous American spies - are exceedingly aggressive, pushing and sometimes bursting through the technological, legal and political boundaries of lawful surveillance. Written for a general audience by a surveillance law expert, this book educates readers about how the reality of modern surveillance differs from popular understanding.
Truth and Power - About The Issue: Cell Phone Surveillance
Jennifer Granick, Director of Civil Liberties, is in this episode discussing Stingray technology.
"Truth and Power" highlights Daniel Rigmaiden, the young tech-genius who exposed STINGRAY - a secret government surveillance technology that hacks into your cell phones. All New Episodes - Fridays at 10 p.m. ET / PT on Pivot. Learn more at http://bit.ly/TruthAndPowerPivot.
Phone Carriers Tight-Lipped On How They Will Comply With New Surveillance Law
""The phone companies may already have data retention obligations under the Communications Act, but there's no additional obligation as a result of USA Freedom having passed," says Jennifer Granick, director of civil liberties at Stanford University's Center for Internet and Society.
The long arms of the right to be forgotten
"A year ago, a European Court said people had a right to demand Google take down certain search results about them. Theright to be forgotten was born.
"That idea is spreading in some areas," says Jennifer Granick, Director of Civil Liberties for the Stanford Center for Internet and Society.
Brown Bag Lunch Series | Jennifer Granick discusses Surveillance
Jennifer Granick, Director of Civil Liberties, presented her work with the Stanford Center for Internet and Society, and the impacts of Edward Snowden.
Granick Says People Should Be More Outraged About Internet Privacy
Jennifer Granick, director of civil liberties for the Stanford Center for Internet and Society, said that people aren't really understanding how the Internet is being enforced and legislated because it's become more complicated.