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.

I was a member of the Recurse Center’s Spring 1 2020 batch; like all Recursers, I never graduated.

I went to Andover for 9th through 12th grade. I was lucky to be able to do several independent projects in my senior year on digital propaganda, censorship, cybersecurity, and surveillance.

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 is a consumer app that records voice recordings — typically meetings — and turns them into organized, detailed notes.

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.

PrivacySpy rates companies’ privacy policies on a ten-point scale, so you can easily understand how your data is being treated online. I started PrivacySpy with Igor Barakaiev in the summer of 2019.

WhoAreMyRepresentatives.org (WAMR) is a simple tool to look up the government representatives for any U.S. address. It pulls its information from the Google Civics API and the OpenSecrets API.

a17t is my lightweight open-source atomic design toolkit. It emphasizes customization, modularity, and separation of concerns (to the extent that is practical).

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.

In this independent research project, Jeffrey Shen and I created CensorScout and the Weibo Censorship Dashboard, two pilot applications that make several steps toward increased transparency into censorship on Weibo and provide valuable—albeit limited—information regarding the state of Chinese Internet censorship.

In this independent research project, Jeffrey Shen and I used machine learning and statistics to better understand the Russian disinformation campaign in the 2016 election. We released three blog posts, launched a Twitter bot, an open API, and deployed an interactive machine learning model.

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.

• 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)

I love computing; I enjoy building systems, as well as just programming for programming’s sake. (The Joy of Computing!)

Most of the software I write is open source, and some people have found this software helpful: collectively, my repositories have over 1,000 “stars” on GitHub. In maintaining and contributing to these projects, I’ve learned about effective community building, communication, advertising, and documentation.

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.

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.

During the summer of 2022, I worked on privacy at Apple, as part of the Privacy Engineering team. It was an amazing experience.

Politiwatch is a non-profit that technology to promote political accountability, digital rights, and social awareness. I founded Politiwatch as a way to distance myself from some of my more controversial projects. (They weren’t that controversial, but I didn’t feel comfortable putting my name on them.)

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.

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.

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.

I ran PACTF, a global cybersecurity competition with over 1,000 teams and $20,000 in prizes, in 2017 and 2018.