Bio
Susan N. Herman
Susan N. Herman was elected President of the American Civil Liberties Union in October 2008, after having served on the ACLU National Board of Directors for twenty years, as a member of the Executive Committee for sixteen years, and as General Counsel for ten years. Herman holds a chair as Centennial Professor of Law at Brooklyn Law School, where she currently teaches courses in Constitutional Law and Criminal Procedure, and seminars on Law and Literature, and Terrorism and Civil Liberties.
She writes extensively on constitutional and criminal procedure topics for scholarly and other publications, ranging from law reviews and books to periodicals and on-line publications. Recent publications include two books, TERRORISM, GOVERNMENT, AND LAW: NATIONAL AUTHORITY AND LOCAL AUTONOMY IN THE WAR ON TERROR, editor and co-author, with Paul Finkelman (Praeger Security International 2008) and THE RIGHT TO A SPEEDY AND PUBLIC TRIAL (Praeger 2006) (part of a series on the Constitution), and law review articles including The USA PATRIOT Act and the Submajoritarian Fourth Amendment, 41 HARV. CIV. RTS.-CIV. LIB. L. REV. 67 (2006).
Nicholas Merrill
Nicholas Merrill was the first person to challenge the National Security Letters provision in the USA PATRIOT Act in a court of law. He is the Executive Director of The Calyx Institute, a non-profit organization focused on promoting best practices with regards to privacy within the Telecommunications Industry.
He founded Calyx Internet Access Corporation in 1995. Calyx Internet Access was one of the first commercial Internet service providers operating in New York City and soon opened a sister company in Amsterdam. Calyx served many journalists, civil liberties groups and non-profit organizations on a pro bono or low-cost basis, including the New York Civil Liberties Union, the Independent Media Center (Indymedia.org) and Democracy Now! Radio. Calyx also worked with for-profit businesses, including Mitsubishi Motors, IKEA, Snapple, and Tanqueray.
In 2004, after a request for information from the FBI, Calyx became involved with the ACLU in using the legal system and the media to resist illegal government requests for information on Internet users. For six and a half years, Merrill and the ACLU tirelessly challenged the orders contained in the letter, resulting in the establishment of two key legal precedents overturning aspects of the national security letter program.
Jay Stanley
Jay Stanley researches, writes and speaks about technology-related privacy and civil liberties issues and their future. Stanley has authored and co-authored a variety of influential ACLU reports on such topics as government and private-sector surveillance, network neutrality, scientific freedom, privacy-enforcing institutions, data mining, NSA spying, video surveillance, and airline passenger security.
Stanley was co-chair of the successful 2009 Computers, Freedom and Privacy (CFP) conference in Washington DC. Before joining the ACLU in 2001, he was an analyst at the technology research firm Forrester, where he focused on Internet policy issues. Stanley also served as the American politics editor of Facts on File's World News Digest. He is a graduate of Williams College and holds an M.A. in American History from the University of Virginia.
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