Education
Stanford University — Class of ’24
From September 2020 to June 2024, I was an undergraduate at Stanford. I majored in Symbolic Systems with an individually designed concentration in Digital Safety, Security, and Society.
Recurse Center — Spring 1 ’20 batch
I was a member of the Recurse Center’s Spring 1 2020 batch; like all Recursers, I never graduated.
Projects
Atlos — Visual investigations at scale
Atlos is a platform for open source visual investigations. It helps journalists, human rights organizations, and OSINT investigators collaborate at scale. Atlos is supported by National Geographic, the Brown Institute, and Microsoft.
Paxo — AI meeting notes
Paxo is a consumer app that records voice recordings — typically meetings — and turns them into organized, detailed notes.
Shynet — Open source web analytics
Shynet is a modern, privacy-friendly, and detailed web analytics tool that works without cookies or JS. It’s one of my most successful open source projects. Check out the source code and installation instructions on GitHub.
a17t — Atomic design toolkit
a17t is my lightweight open-source atomic design toolkit. It emphasizes customization, modularity, and separation of concerns (to the extent that is practical).
More projects — Various older projects
A selection of older projects:
- WhyPrivacyMatters.org — a collaborative project to argue for privacy; translated into 16 languages with over 30 contributors
- OpenAlerts — an open source breaking news distribution system for newsrooms (with News Catalyst)
- Politiwatch Disinformation Archive — a searchable index of the official Twitter disinformation archives
Research
Synthetic Disinformation — Sarah Kreps & OpenAI
In this multi-part research project, Dr. Sarah Kreps and I studied how synthetic (AI-generated) disinformation can deceive the public and masquerade as reliable, human-written news.
More research — COVID, drones, privacy
You can see an overview of my research on my Google Scholar page.
An Investigation of Social Media Labeling Decisions Preceding the 2020 U.S. Election (November 2023)
Platforms’ content moderation decisions play a large role in mediating online discourse, especially during elections. What content did platforms label as misleading in the run up to the 2020 election? And were platforms consistent in their labeling decisions? In this paper, we leverage a unique dataset to answer these questions.
Skills
Speaking — DEF CON, RightsCon, and elsewhere
Conferences
- DEF CON 31: The Hackers, The Lawyers, and the Defense Fund
- RightsCon 2023: Designing Safer Visual Investigations at Scale
Selected Guest Lectures
- Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism: Large-Scale Open Source Investigations with Atlos (2023)
- American University: Investigating Far-Right ‘Alt’ Platforms (2023)
- Stanford University: Large-Scale Open Source Investigations with Atlos (in “Online Open Source Investigations”, 2022)
Programming — Python, Rust, Haskell, Web...
I love computing; I enjoy building systems, as well as just programming for programming’s sake. (The Joy of Computing!)
Open source development — Public creation
Most of the software I write is open source. In maintaining and contributing to these projects, I’ve learned about effective community building, communication, and documentation.
Work
Stanford Internet Observatory — Infrastructure and investigations
Since October 2020, I’ve worked at the Stanford Internet Observatory (SIO) as a technical research assistant. I’ve worked on a combination of technical infrastructure, research projects, and investigations.
CISA — Election security & risk management
From December 2022 to March 2023, I worked at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) inside National Risk Management Center (NRMC). I worked on election security and risk management. It was a fantastic experience.
Apple — Privacy Engineering
During the summer of 2022, I worked on privacy at Apple, as part of the Privacy Engineering team. It was an amazing experience.
Floodgate Reactor — Startup 'accelerator'
I was part of Floodgate’s Reactor program. With my good friend Rhythm, I co-created:
- An AI meeting notes app called Paxo that we grew to $20k in ARR. We didn’t spend any money on advertising — all our growth was original. We sold the business.
- A “semantic observability” tool called Watchpost to give businesses a way to monitor the quality of their generative AI model outputs.
- An end-to-end encrypted location sharing app for family safety called Latitude.
Politics — Campaigns and policy
Starting in the spring of 2019, I worked on the technology subgroup of a major U.S. presidential campaign (mostly working on matters of cyber policy). I worked with the team to draft policy positions, and wrote weekly cyber policy briefings for the candidate.
News Catalyst — Empowering local newsrooms
In the fall of 2019, I worked at News Catalyst, building digital tools to empower local news organizations. My work at News Catalyst was supported by the Lenfest Institute.
First Look Media — IETF standards & research
In the summer of 2018, I worked on the engineering and research teams of First Look Media, the parent company of The Intercept, primarily on authoring an IETF Internet Draft.
Politiwatch — 501(c)(3) nonprofit
Politiwatch is a nonprofit I founded in high school that uses technology to promote political accountability and digital rights.
