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.Phillips Academy Andover — Class of ’19, cum laude
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.
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.Shynet — Open source web analytics
Shynet is a modern, privacy-friendly, and detailed web analytics tool that works without cookies or JS.PrivacySpy — Making privacy accessible
PrivacySpy rates companies’ privacy policies on a ten-point scale, so you can easily understand how your data is being treated online.Paxo — AI meeting notes
Paxo is a consumer app that records voice recordings — typically meetings — and turns them into organized, detailed notes.WhoAreMyRepresentatives — Easily find your reps
WhoAreMyRepresentatives.org (WAMR) is a simple tool to look up the government representatives for any U.S. address.PolitiTweet — Public figures' deleted tweets
PolitiTweet preserves the public record by archiving the tweets of major public figures and prominently displaying those that have been deleted.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 — Cyber101, PollPA, and more
Here are a few more projects that I’ve worked on over the past few years. A number of these projects have been discontinued, so some of the links may be broken!
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.Chinese Censorship — Jeffrey Shen & Palfrey
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.Russian Disinformation — Jeffrey Shen & Palfrey
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.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.
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!Design — Because beauty & usability matters
Design is vague. I know. In this context, I’m referring to both system design and graphic design.Open source development — Public creation
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.More skills — Hackathons, ham radio
Hackathons I love hackathons, whether it’s as a participant or—as of recently—a judge. It’s hard to replicate the thrill of building.
Work
Stanford Internet Observatory — Infrastructure and investigations
Since October 2020, I’ve worked at the Stanford Internet Observatory (SIO) as a technical research assistant.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).Apple — Privacy Engineering
During the summer of 2022, I worked on privacy at Apple, as part of the Privacy Engineering team.Politiwatch — 501(c)(3) nonprofit
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.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.Politics — Campaigns and policy
Starting in the spring of 2019, I worked on the technology subgroup of a major U.News Catalyst — Empowering local newsrooms
In the fall of 2019, I worked at News Catalyst, building digital tools to empower local news organizations.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.More work — PACTF, Teaching, Torch
PACTF I ran PACTF, a global cybersecurity competition with over 1,000 teams and $20,000 in prizes, in 2017 and 2018.