B.A., Princeton; J.D., Cornell
Jonathan (“Jono”) Fischbach
Associate Deputy General Counsel
Office of the General Counsel—Intelligence
Department of Defense
Jono Fischbach is an Associate Deputy General Counsel at the Department of Defense (DoD). His areas of practice include open source intelligence, artificial intelligence and machine learning, commercial data, intelligence enterprise development, signals intelligence, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, and intelligence oversight. Prior to joining DoD, Jono was the Associate General Counsel for Technology and National Security Law at the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), where he served as chief legal counsel to DIA’s Directorate of Analysis and Open Source Intelligence Integration Center.
Jono was born and raised in West Lafayette, Indiana, home of Purdue University. He received his Bachelor of Arts degree in 1998 from the School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University, and his Juris Doctor degree in 2002 from Cornell Law School, where he served as an editor on the Cornell Law Review. After graduating from law school, Jono clerked for the Honorable Kermit V. Lipez on the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit. In 2003, he entered private practice as a litigation associate at Morgan Lewis LLP. Jono’s litigation portfolio at Morgan Lewis included IP and patent litigation, antitrust and appellate matters, and other class action and complex litigation issues.
In 2006, Jono left private practice to become a senior trial attorney in the Civil Rights Division at the Department of Justice. Jono transferred to the National Security Division at the Department of Justice in 2013, where he spent two years representing the United States in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) and Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review (FISC-R) on a variety of FISA-related oversight, operational, and transparency-related matters. In 2016, Jono accepted a two-year assignment to the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC) at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. As the Identities Intelligence counsel at NCTC, Jono’s portfolio included FISA oversight, NCTC’s open-source intelligence program, and a variety of legal, policy and litigation-related matters connected to NCTC’s support of the terrorist watchlist.