The Center’s NatSec Tech incubator’s pilot project – Social Media & Tech 360: Innovation, Security, & Governance – will address a range of risks and opportunities emanating from social media, including disinformation campaigns, online extremist organizing, regulatory gaps and the privatization of public oversight. Task Force members include experts from diverse backgrounds and experiences, including from the legislative, judicial, and executive branches of the US government, technology companies, traditional and next generation media, law, finance, civil society, and academia. Members are contributing in their individual capacities.

Meet the task Force

Matt Abrams

Abrams is a technologist, investor, advisor, speaker, and outdoor adventurer who inspires startup founders and C-level executives to think bigger and bolder. His expertise and focus is in: Enterprise Data & Analytics, Artificial Intelligence (AI) & Machine Learning, Information Quality & Integrity, Security, and Healthcare.

He has spent over 25 years in the Enterprise software industry working across various Government, Healthcare, Startups, Enterprises and Venture Capital Funds and organizations.

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Gerrin T. Alexander

As a 2021 graduate from the University of Chicago, Alexander holds degrees in Political Science and Public Policy Studies. At UChicago, she served as the Senior Opinion Editor for the school’s first independent, student-run publication, the Chicago Thinker. She is currently studying abroad to pursue a Master’s in International Relations at the International University of Japan (IUJ).

Her research interests include investigating the linkage between U.S. national cyber and national security strategy, focusing on U.S.-Japan cyber security cooperation.

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Leonard Bailey

Bailey is Head of Computer Crime and Intellectual Property Section’s (CCIPS) Cybersecurity Unit and Special Counsel for National Security in the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) Criminal Division.

He joined DOJ’s Terrorism and Violent Crime Section in 1991. In the late 1990’s, he served as Special Counsel and Special Investigative Counsel to DOJ’s Inspector General and supervised sensitive investigations of Department officials and programs.

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Sharon Bradford Franklin

Sharon Bradford Franklin is Chair of the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board. Prior to her appointment as Chair, Ms. Franklin served as Co-Director of the Security and Surveillance Project at the Center for Democracy & Technology (CDT), leading advocacy on a broad range of issues involving surveillance, cybersecurity, encryption, civil liberties, and civil rights.

Previously, she was the Policy Director for New America’s Open Technology Institute (OTI), directing OTI’s policy work on issues including cybersecurity, encryption, freedom of expression online, government surveillance, privacy, and platform accountability.

From 2013 through 2017, Ms. Franklin served as Executive Director of the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board. She supervised and directed the PCLOB’s staff in reviewing federal counterterrorism activities in support of the Board’s mission to ensure that such programs include appropriate safeguards for privacy and civil liberties.

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Whitney Kimball Coe

Coe is a vice president and Director of National Programs for the Center for Rural Strategies.

She directs the work of the National Rural Assembly, a program that brings together rural leaders and advocates from every region with national public- interest organizations, funders, and policymakers in ways that inform public policy and private investment in rural people and places.

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Laura K. Donohue

Donohue is the Chair of the Social Media Governance Task Force and Professor of Law at Georgetown Law, Director of Georgetown’s Center on National Security and the Law, and Director of the Center on Privacy and Technology.

She writes on political theory, public law, constitutional law, federal courts, national security, and legal history. Her work on new and emerging technologies centers on social media, biometric identification, augmented and virtual reality, artificial intelligence, and drones.

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Doowan Lee

Doowan Lee is a technologist and national security expert who has worked on publicly funded analytic projects on aggregating, detecting, and analyzing large-data sources on foreign and extremist information operations.

He has extensively worked with federal innovation and R&D programs from DARPA, IWTSD (CTTSO), and OSD.

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Judge Margaret McKeown

McKeown was appointed to the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in 1998. She graduated from Georgetown University Law Center in 1975 and holds an honorary degree from Georgetown University.

She has published and lectured throughout the world on intellectual property, international law, ethics, and constitutional law and has participated in numerous rule of law initiatives with judges and lawyers.

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Saiph Savage

Savage is an Assistant Professor at Northeastern University and co-Director of the Civic Innovation Lab at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM).

For her civic tech research, Dr. Savage was named one of the 35 Innovators under 35 by the MIT Technology Review where she focuses on organizing citizen crowds to address critical problems in society.

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Amanda Shanor

Shanor is an Assistant Professor at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, where her scholarship focuses on constitutional law, and in particular the intersection of the First Amendment and economic life.

Prior to joining the academy, Shanor was a practicing lawyer in the National Legal Department of the American Civil Liberties Union.

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Congresswoman Lori Trahan

Trahan proudly serves Massachusetts’ Third District. Growing up in a working-class family in Lowell, Massachusetts, Lori learned the principles of sacrifice, hard work, and grit. The first in her family to graduate college, Lori earned a scholarship to play Division 1 volleyball at Georgetown University. After college, she joined former Congressman Marty Meehan’s staff, working her way up to Chief of Staff.

After serving Massachusetts for nearly ten years, Lori moved to the private sector as the only female executive at a tech company and later a co-founder of a women- owned and -operated consulting firm focused on elevating women to leadership positions.

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Irene S. Wu

Wu is a senior analyst at the Federal Communications Commission and an expert on the global politics, history, and regulation of communications technology, with publications on telecom regulation in China, politics and technology.

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Design Facilitator

Dr. Dawan Stanford is the Design Studio Director and Professor in the Master of Arts in Learning and Design at Georgetown University. The degree combines methods of learning and design, learning analytics, technology and innovation, and emerging challenges in future of the university.

The Studio serves as a space where students integrate their core coursework in the program, develop as learning design practitioners, apply design methods to their projects, and develop their leadership, collaboration and facilitation skills.

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