Camille Acey is a former tech worker, a mom, a community organizer, and a conscious closures consultant. She is founder of The Wind-Down (wind-down.org), an independent studio that designs and delivers tools, practices, and services to aid mission-driven projects and organizations in the process of closing down. Over the past 25 years, she has worked with/for community cooperatives, tech companies, open-source projects, nonprofits, and activist groups. She was a cofounder of the Collective for Liberation, Ecology, and Technology (CoLET), a radical feminist tech collective, and has also served on governance and advisory boards for local, national, and international organizations. She brings all this experience to her work of shepherding joyful endings.

Altair is a curious hacker and professional burnout. His interests include obscure operating systems, programming languages, permacomputing, and the entire repertoire of Charles Villiers Stanford. When he isn’t raising keyboard interrupts, he enjoys spending time with his friends, going to coffee shops, and eating fat burritos.

Rambo Anderson-You has been doing offensive security for almost a decade now. He’s okay at it, and has gotten by mostly on personality. He likes learning, being a dad, and walking everywhere. He built Nullface (nullface.me) to make facial recognition evasion practical and accessible.

Nasir Barday is a UX design lead at Bloomberg who’s spent a career designing decision-making interfaces for capital markets: Goldman Sachs, Fidelity, Citadel, Wells Fargo. Behavior is his medium. He knows how the sausage gets made because he’s been in the room.

Daly Barnett is a multidisciplinary technologist whose work focuses on disarming the antisocial impacts of computers. She pursues this by empowering liberation movement workers with the knowledge and capability to resist the annihilating forces of surveillance and hypercapitalist technology overreach. Daly is most attuned to movements for bodily autonomy, with dedicated experience advocating for and working within criminalized issue-spaces such as sex worker rights, transgender liberation, and abortion access. She believes OPSEC for liberation is achieved through community activation (not through application of corporate infosec paradigms) and that bodily autonomy and self-determination are paramount obligations worth fighting for.

Scott Beibin is an inventor, researcher, creative technologist, science artist, founder of many projects, environmental activist, and analog astronaut. He is the initiator and cofounder of Offworld Voyage, an organization that focuses on the development of the M.A.R.S. Tesseract space analog research habitat system – a modular and portable design for environmentally sustainable science research facilities intended to support experimental closed loop systems focusing on in-situ resource utilization, plant based food production, and reclamation of metabolic waste. He is a core committee member of the Journal of Space Analog Research, a peer-reviewed publication from the Mars Society dedicated to advancing our understanding of human space exploration through terrestrial analog studies. He is the founder of Mandelbot Ecotech, an open-source hardware project that incorporates ecological sustainability, human autonomy, and decentralized coordination mechanisms into machine design. In his other science endeavors, he 3D scans archaeological sites around the globe using LiDAR, and gathers acoustic field recordings and sensor data through his AncientScan and Archaoacoustic Artifacts projects.

Rev. Elæ Moss Benedetto is a trans interspiritual minister, artist-researcher, social scientist, and sustainable systems-focused urban designer working at the intersection of radical faith infrastructure, systems design, and social transformation. They are the founder of The Operating System and Liminal Lab – a decades-running open-access publication and peer education platform – and creative director of Autonomous Mechanics Design Studio. Elæ brings nearly three decades of direct action organizing, mutual aid system building, and community-embedded care praxis to this work. They serve as campus minister and adjunct professor at Pratt Institute and as spiritual care and fellowship director at Faith in Harm Reduction. Exhibited and published widely across theory, intermedia, and para-academic forms, Elæ’s preferred medium is questions, and their ministry is building infrastructures for futures that don’t yet exist.

Emma Best is a journalist, historian, whistleblower, and a former hacker who founded Distributed Denial of Secrets (DDoSecrets), a 501(c)(3) journalist nonprofit that has published major leaks from more than 90 countries.

Mikalai Birukou is a software architect and privacy advocate focused on building decentralized, user-first digital ecosystems. He is a core developer of 3NWeb and technical lead at Ivy Cyber, where he develops the PrivacySafe applications. Mikalai has pioneered solutions that prioritize user sovereignty over corporate interests. His work in encrypted messaging, identity management, and federated storage aims to reshape how people interact with digital services, ensuring privacy, security, and autonomy in an increasingly surveilled world.

Peter Bloom is a community autonomy activist based in Mexico working around the world with his colleagues at Rhizomatica since 2009 to create free and open digital communication tools and deploy infrastructure for autonomy for communities and their social and political movements.

Steve Bossert is a lifelong wireless technology enthusiast who has worked with semiconductor, network infrastructure, content providers, and mobile operators globally since 2004 to help provide corporate strategy market research and go-to-market assistance. As an amateur radio operator (K2GOG) now for almost 25 years, Steve continues to converge hiking, drones, 3D printing, and space communications to be a more active part of modern STEM focused crossover topics relating to the future of amateur radio and is a supporter of the ARRL.

Jamie Brew is a karaoke safety researcher based in Brooklyn. He writes for The Onion, was the head writer of ClickHole and cofounded Botnik, an art tech group devoted to absurdly small language models. He co-hosts Robot Karaoke at Wonderville every other month with Jenn Schiffer and at random elsewhere.

William Budington is a longtime activist, cryptography enthusiast, and a senior staff technologist on EFF’s public interest technology team. His research has been featured in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Guardian, and cited by the U.S. Congress. His primary interest lies in dismantling systems of oppression, building up collaborative alternatives and, to borrow a phrase from Zapatismo, fighting for a “world in which many worlds fit.” He loves hacker spaces and getting together with other techies to tinker, code, share, and build the technological commons.

Fae Carlisle works across threat intelligence, DFIR, and threat hunting, with a focus on turning intelligence into something operational. She builds systems that connect signals across incidents, infrastructure, and adversary behavior to support detection and real-time response. Her work centers on making security more proactive, not just reactive.

Frank Chiarulli (KD2UIW) is a software engineer and artist in Brooklyn who works on privacy, security, and open-source tools, happiest somewhere between the kernel and the network card but often finding himself all the way up the stack. He runs his own ASN, and past lives include the Recurse Center, privacy startups, B2B SaaS, and a big bank he doesn’t talk about. He also makes sculpture, photography, and installations, and is of the opinion that an enclosure is an open invitation.

Lena Cohen is a staff technologist primarily focused on developing Privacy Badger – a browser extension used by over three million people to stop companies from tracking their activity as they browse the web. At EFF, Lena also works on issues of commercial surveillance, the data broker industry, and consumer privacy. Lena holds a degree in computer science and in science, technology, and society from Brown University.

Cindy Cohn is a renowned American civil liberties attorney who served as the executive director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) from 2015 to 2026. She is highly regarded as one of the country’s leading legal defenders of digital rights, privacy, and free speech. Before stepping up as executive director, she spent 15 years as the organization’s legal director and general counsel, leading campaigns against corporate overreach, platform censorship, and FBI gag orders.

Elizabeth Jane Cole is a cofounder of Offworld Voyage, an organization dedicated to the design of environmentally sustainable training habitats for space analog research missions that include methodologies for in-situ plant-based (vegan) food production, water reclamation, waste management, and off-grid autonomous clean energy production. Elizabeth cofounded Evil Twin Booking Agency, a horizontally run agency representing public figures in science, arts, and activism. She is an alumna of the Mars Desert Research Station (MDRS Crew 286) where she served as crew journalist, and a core committee member of the Journal of Space Analog Research, a peer-reviewed publication from The Mars Society dedicated to advancing our understanding of human space exploration through terrestrial analog studies. In the past, she has written for Wired Magazine and produced an episode for NPR’s Love and Radio podcast. She is passionate about narrative design, decentralized coordination systems for autonomous and collective action, and practices for staying physically fit in analog missions.

Joe Cupano is thankful for what he calls “an accidental career” in technology that started with component level repair of early microcomputers (as in solder iron) to turning technology tricks in three piece suits for globally recognized companies. Outside of his professional life, Joe is an Amateur Extra Class radio operator licensed as NE2Z who likes to experiment with low power transceivers, software defined radio, antenna design, and helping new “hams” get further into amateur radio.

Matt Desmarais is a disabled, self-taught maker and hacker who has been working with open-source projects since 2012. He focuses on experimentation, autonomy, and learning whatever tools are necessary to build the systems he wants to see exist. Recently, his work has centered on AI, not as a finished product, but as a material to prototype with, question, and repurpose.

Sophie Downward is a catgirl hacker based in NYC. She can often be found sticking Nix where it doesn’t belong, programming on the subway, or bending transistors to her sheer will. She fiddles with all levels of the stack, from writing Ruby on Rails code (professionally, and for fun) to developing her own custom hardware and firmware.

Hal Eisen is a long-time tinkerer and currently serves as CTO at App Dev for All. He’s driven by the philosophy that software development tools should be accessible to everyone. Hal was recently appointed to the board of directors for Art in Action, a nonprofit dedicated to bringing art education to children. When he’s not on the water sailing, you’ll likely find him studying chess openings, perfecting a keto-friendly recipe, or figuring out how to 3D print a custom part for his wife.

elixx first got access to the Internet at the ripe age of 10, through a local library’s Gopher freenet just before the thing called the World Wide Web changed the Internet forever. Three years later, a kind stranger at a bookstore introduced him to 2600. He remained with console net access until the millennium teleported him into the world of broadband. After graduating high school, he used his graduation money to buy a used laptop, a train ticket, and a pass to H2K2. He has been involved in the scene, off-and-on, ever since.

Cyril Engmann is a hardware and embedded systems engineer based in Brooklyn, where he runs The Garage Agency, a boutique shop specializing in early-stage product development for hardware startups. His work spans custom PCB design, firmware, cybersecurity, and Linux platform engineering. He builds things that shouldn’t exist yet, then writes about how they came to.

Rev. Eon spent much of their life immersed in code and circuits before turning their attention to the wild intelligence of plants. Now a clinical herbalist and remedy maker, they work with the Mugworts Free Herbal Clinic, a grassroots care project dedicated to health sovereignty and community resilience. Eon brings a hacker ethic to the world of herbal medicine, celebrating the beauty, complexity, and radical diversity of nature.

Anas El Faijah is a recent cybersecurity graduate from Belgium. His work focuses on GRC, cybersecurity regulation, assurance, and the way security requirements become practical controls, evidence, and responsibilities. He keeps a hybrid profile by also spending his nights on CTFs, personal research, and hands-on projects. He is interested in the intersection between open-source, security, regulation, and the people building and maintaining software, usually with his cat (mimi) somewhere nearby.

Abdel Fane is the founder of OpenA2A, an open-source project building the trust layer for AI agents, and executive director of CSNP, a community of 12,500 security professionals across 16 chapters. He spent 20 years in technology and enterprise security at Allstate, Grail, Booz Allen Hamilton, and Protiviti before turning to AI agent security full time. His current research includes the OpenA2A honeypot fleet, the Agent Threat Matrix, and the monthly Behavioral Threat Report at research.opena2a.org.

Cara Gagliano is a senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Her practice focuses on trademark, copyright, and free speech issues, especially helping to fight attempts to use IP law to silence activists, artists, and critics. She also works on EFF’s Coders’ Rights Project, assisting programmers, developers, and researchers who are helping to build a safer future for us all. Across her work, Cara takes a particular interest in cases supporting the rights of incarcerated people.

Kestral Gaian is a writer of fiction, theatre, and poetry, whose work explores systems, survival, and the strange beauty of being human. Having spent years working in technology before leaving corporate life behind, Kestral’s stories often ask what it means to stay human in systems that seem to forget what that means.

Jack Gangi has worked at the intersection of privacy, culture, and independent media. His projects include grist.ink, an independent publication on technology and civil liberties; stickertop.art, a gallery of sticker-covered laptops submitted by people across the Internet; zinedrop.com, a zine discovery and sharing directory; and dontboo.vote, a civic information dashboard. He has been active in hacker and counterculture communities for decades, and believes the best technology is built to connect rather than consume.

Evan Greer is a trans and queer activist, writer, and musician based in Boston. When she’s not playing queer anarcho-indie-punk music, she’s the director of digital rights group Fight for the Future and writes regularly about the intersection of tech policy and human rights for The Washington Post, Time, NBC News, Wired, The Boston Globe, and CNN. Since organizing her first protest as a high school student opposed to the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan, Greer has been behind some of the highest profile activist campaigns in modern history, from the mass online protests to save net neutrality to celebrity-drenched campaigns against Spotify, Amazon, and other abusive tech giants. She’s a regular guest on TV and radio offering incisive commentary on the intersection of technology, human rights, and LGBTQ issues.

Johannes Grenzfurthner (monochrom) manipulates people to positively respond to his lies and made-up realities, and he feeds off these emotions. He is an award-winning artist, filmmaker, author, and performer. Johannes lives and works in Vienna, Austria. He is the founder and artistic director of monochrom, an internationally acting art and theory group and film production company. Boing Boing referred to him as a leitnerd, a wordplay that ironically hints at his role in nerd/hacker/art culture.

Ryan Grim is a reporter at Drop Site News, and previously led the Washington bureaus for The Intercept and HuffPost. At HuffPost, he led a team that was twice a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and won once. He has spent years chronicling the rise of progressives in Congress, and his most recent book is The Squad: AOC and the Hope of a Political Revolution, which followed his best-selling We’ve Got People.

Based in Vienna, Jasmin Hagendorfer is a contemporary artist, filmmaker, and curator, known for her bold approach to sociopolitical topics and gender identity. She is the co-founder and festival director of the Porn Film Festival Vienna, a unique event combining feminist and queer perspectives with art and pornography. Her TEDx talk “How Good Porn Can Save the Planet” explores the environmental potential of alternative porn. She contributed to Fragile Fäden – Beziehungsweisen im Kapitalismus and is co-editor of the Arse Elektronika anthology Sexponential. Her short films, including Musings of a Mechatronic Mistress, Slugfest, and Fudliaks! Tear The Sexes Apart!, have screened at festivals internationally and merge media art with critical cultural reflection.

Rose Hall is an engineer currently at the Recurse Center in New York who builds infrastructure to enable others’ ambitions across whatever part of the stack is needed, from ARM firmware to community-facing apps. They’ve reverse engineered embedded systems, built tools that disappear into the walls, and founded their first company at 16. They care most about making the people near them more capable – and more dangerous.

Phillip Hallam-Baker was a member of the CERN team that originally developed the World Wide Web. As principal scientist of VeriSign Inc., he made seminal contributions to the WebPKI, Web Services Security, and SAML. His current research focus is private key infrastructure built using threshold technology.

Jeremy Hammond is a hacker, anarchist, antifascist, community organizer, outside agitator, founder of HackThisSite.org, and former WikiLeaks source, having been imprisoned for Anonymous hack-and-leak actions against governments, police, and the security industry.

Jen Helsby is the chief technology officer at Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF), where she oversees the organization’s engineering teams. She is an engineer, researcher, and cypherpunk. Prior to this role, she was a founding engineer at Penumbra Labs, focusing on applied cryptography for privacy-preserving payments. She previously led development for the SecureDrop whistleblower platform. She also cofounded Lucy Parsons Labs, a Chicago-based civil liberties group. She holds a doctorate in astrophysics from the University of Chicago.

Harlo Holmes is the chief security programs officer at Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF). She leads a team that boosts newsmakers’ confidence and effectiveness in securing their communications within their newsrooms, with their sources, and with the public at large. She is a media scholar, software programmer, and activist. Harlo was a regular contributor to the open-source mobile security collective Guardian Project, where she spearheaded the media metadata verification initiative currently empowering ProofMode, Save by OpenArchive, eyeWitness to Atrocities, and others.

John Huntington is an author, educator, entertainment and show control systems consultant, and sound engineer. He is also an award-winning photographer and storm chaser. Huntington is a professor emeritus of entertainment technology after more than 24 years at New York City College of Technology, also known as Citytech, which is part of CUNY. At Citytech, he led the audio, live video, and networking/control areas, and for more than 20 years designed the show control systems and oversaw the A/V for the Gravesend Inn. His book Show Networks and Control Systems was the industry standard until it was retired and replaced with two books: Introduction to Show Networking (2020) and Introduction to Show Control (2023).

Murtaza Hussain is a journalist at Drop Site News. He reports on global conflict and espionage and was one of the reporters on the Edward Snowden NSA leaks in 2013.

William Hutson is a Guyanese immigrant living in Flushing. He is the founder of Flushing Tech, where he has organized bi-weekly hackathons for almost three years. He enjoys devops engineering during the day, and some combination of being a maker, athlete, wonderer, and citizen the rest of the time.

Mr. Icom’s first article for 2600 was published in 1987, and has appeared in the magazine every few years since then. His latest article, of the same name as his talk, was in the Autumn 2021 issue. He spoke about pagers at the first HOPE in 1994. He is the editor of Cyber-Tek: The Cyberpunk Techncial Journal (est. 1990). He can be found at cybertekzine1990.substack.com/.

Steven Irurueta is a systems engineer specializing in enterprise identity, Microsoft 365, cloud collaboration, and AI governance. Over the past decade, he has designed and operated large-scale digital workplace environments for organizations across multiple industries while remaining active in the hacker community through 2600 and its meetups. He enjoys exploring the intersection of technology, privacy, organizational behavior, and the unintended consequences of complex systems.

Sheshananda Reddy Kandula is a cybersecurity expert with over 16 years of experience specializing in application security, cloud security, and AI-driven security solutions. He has a strong background in securing web, mobile, API, and GenAI ecosystems, with deep expertise in threat modeling, vulnerability management, and secure code reviews. As a staff security engineer at Adobe, he leads security initiatives across large-scale engineering teams, ensuring the security of Android, iOS, and web applications. He holds industry-recognized certifications, including OSWE, OSCP, and CISSP, and actively contributes to the security community through research, conference speaking, and mentorship.

Smitha Khorana is trained as a journalist and recently completed a chapter, “Surveillance and Source Protection,” for the book Journalistic Source Protection in the Age of Democratic Backsliding, forthcoming by Springer in 2026. She has researched source protection and surveillance in Türkiye and co-edited the book Journalism After Snowden: The Future of the Free Press in the Surveillance State. She has done reporting on the Yemeni American community for The Guardian and The Intercept. She has presented this work at the Journalist’s Safety Conference in Oslo, Norway for two consecutive years.

Mallory Knodel is a technologist, author, and public interest advocate working at the intersection of Internet governance, technical standards, and human rights. She is the founder of the Social Web Foundation and co-chair of the Human Rights Protocol Considerations research group of the Internet Research Task Force. She previously served as chief technology officer at the Center for Democracy and Technology and as an elected member of the Internet Architecture Board. Mallory has spent 15 years participating in Internet governance and standards bodies including the Internet Engineering Task Force, ICANN, World Wide Web Consortium, and the International Telecommunication Union. She is the author of How the Internet Really Works and the weekly newsletter The Internet Exchange (internet.exchangepoint.tech).

Justin T. Knox is a senior ICS/OT security engineer with 20 years of operational experience across electric and water utilities, datacenter operations, and Internet and telecom infrastructure, and currently supports cybersecurity operations in the energy sector.

LambdaCalculus is chaos in a trenchcoat, and is passionate to his core about human rights issues, community outreach, and education. He is a member of hackers.town, a native of the NYC area, and can still hit a mosh pit!

Meredith Laverty is a senior software engineer at Fight for the Future. Meredith is a software developer with more than 20 years of experience. She previously cofounded Fancy Rabbit Software, has worked with a number of technology startups, and is active in computer science education and mentoring.

Aaron Levitt is a U.S. Navy veteran, OSCP-certified security professional, and founder of Streetwise InfoSec LLC, a cybersecurity consultancy focused on protecting seniors and everyday families from online threats. With roughly 25 years of IT and security experience spanning penetration testing, infrastructure defense, and real-world honeypot deployment, he brings a practitioner’s perspective to both offense and defense. He has the logs to prove the Internet never sleeps.

Jason Long is a software engineer, founder, and technology executive with a passion for social change. He served as chief technology officer at the digital product firm Sevenstar. Born and raised in Chicago, Jason is active in organizations providing opportunities to formerly incarcerated and otherwise marginalized people. Jason founded and built Blue Witness, an AI tool incubated at Human Rights First’s Innovation Lab to combat police violence in the United States.

Jibran Ludwig is a policy strategist at Fight for the Future. Jibran is a policy strategist focused on technology policy, digital rights, and legislative analysis. He previously interned with Representative Cory Bush and brings experience in policy communications, political mapping, and GIS data.

Jorge Luis is an Afro-Caribbean activist, organizer, technologist, and privacy advocate. They’ve worn many hats: carpenter, metalworker, artist manager, game developer, and are now the director of security operations at Constitutional Communications, with a focus on malware analysis, blue teaming, and organizational defenses. Their life experience gives them an understanding of how vulnerable people are because of the way digital systems control every part of our world. In response, Jorge works to both educate people on how to protect each other online and build community centered defenses. In their free time, they obsess about home-labs as community infrastructure.

Colin Mahns is an information security worker from New Jersey and, since 2017, a proud member of the Democratic Socialists of America. He has led campaigns with North Jersey DSA to distribute aid during COVID, abolish ICE, and fight slumlords in Jersey City. For the last five years he has been a leader in DSA’s National Tech Committee, affectionately called “DSA’s member-led IT department” that aims to build and create practical technology tools for DSA members to organize and run their chapters.

Kel McClanahan, Esq. is a national security lawyer who has been working in this field for almost 20 years. He teaches a class called the Law of Secrecy at George Washington University Law School. He has previously taught FOIA-specific workshops at HOPE X and The Eleventh HOPE.

Ryan McGrady is senior research fellow in the Initiative for Digital Public Infrastructure at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Michael McMahon is one of two systems administrators currently working at the Free Software Foundation where he solely uses free software to defend the network and keep the sites and services running on self-hosted, bare-metal infrastructure. Since 2019, he has been a pivotal figure in advancing the FSF’s mission, which promotes software freedom for all. His career includes deploying free operating systems onto servers at an OEM, teaching free software in an after-school program, and publicly speaking about emerging topics, notably delivering a talk titled “Practical Steps to Improve Privacy” at HOPE 2020.

mentalene is an enterprise security architect for a large healthcare organization by day and a security researcher by night. He enjoys exploring both legacy and modern telephony systems, experimenting with all things RF, and digging into the strange corners where technology and communications intersect. When he’s not chasing signals or security flaws, you’ll probably find him turning in lunchtime laps at a local skatepark.

Elissa Miller is a lifelong advocate of empowering people to use the technology they have more effectively. She’s actively opposed to tech industry gatekeeping, especially the premise that you need a second expensive computer to write new software for the one that’s already in your hand.

Rory Mir is director of open access and tech community engagement at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Prior to joining the EFF, Rory was a psychology researcher and instructor at the City University of New York. Their research centered liberation pedagogy and adolescents’ use of social media, and on campus they advocated for protections of student and worker privacy, open science, and open education. They have also led digital security trainings for more than ten years, primarily through the Brooklyn-based CyPurr Collective.

Anna Nicanorova is a creative technologist. Across a career in advertising technology, she has worked at both extremes: the at-scale systems that had to run like a factory, deployed globally across hundreds of markets and the experimental lab that produced the prototypes nobody had built yet. Most of her work is the business of making messy data legible and useful. Prototypes built under her direction have been covered by CNBC, AdWeek, MediaPost, and Ad Age.

Sean O’Brien is an associate research scholar at Yale Law School and director of the cybersecurity and computer science programs, as well as assistant professor at Bay Path University. He is founder of Yale Privacy Lab and deputy director of the Free Software Foundation. Sean has more than two decades of experience in the private and public sectors in areas such as infrastructure management, Free/Libre and Open Source Software (FLOSS), and blockchain security. At Ivy Cyber, “Prof Diggity” develops the curriculum of remote classes and guides the PrivacySafe secure hardware and software products.

Andrew “livitup” Ohnstad (N3OCQ) is an amateur radio operator and technologist with decades of experience in IT and systems work. He is active in education and youth outreach, introducing new audiences to wireless communication through direct engagement and real-world operation. Andrew brings a practical and generational perspective on how curiosity develops across domains.

Gwendolyn Pasquarello is a founding worker-owner and creative technologist with the Emma Technology Co-op. Her client work includes interactive experiences, theme park attractions, games, weird websites, and more. The co-op aims to enable its members in both their professional creative technology work and in their personal art practices.

`Lex Pendragon is a stereotypical middle-aged geek, with a wife and three successful kids. He worked in tech support forever before he had enough of people telling him what to do or how to do it (in 2017). Besides being the IT department for over a dozen clients, he plays D&D, teaches Silat, reads comics, 3D prints, helps his kid’s roller derby team, Linux, Mastodon, ProxMox, Kodi boxes, torrent servers, etc.

Carter Pfaff is a rising senior at Brooklyn Technical High School. As a self-taught engineer, Carter has a passion for understanding how everything works. He has worked as an engineer at DeepAI, making consumer-facing AI software.

Sarah E. Philips is campaign director at Fight for the Future. Sarah directs Fight for the Future’s campaigns on free expression, LGBTQ+ youth, and anti-surveillance. A community activist, youth organizer, and writer, they have worked across reproductive justice, mutual aid, abolition, and South Asian diasporic racial justice advocacy.

Prowex made it to adulthood, but not on purpose.

Tiffany Strauchs Rad is a cybersecurity engineer, attorney, and adjunct professor with more than two decades of experience in technology, law, and cyber security. Her work focuses on securing critical infrastructure and complex mission-critical systems, including transportation and space technologies. She has led initiatives to develop cybersecurity standards and legislation for critical infrastructure and has expertise in network security, resilience, and adversary-informed defense. Tiffany also teaches cybersecurity at three universities, where she emphasizes hands-on, offensive techniques to better prepare students to understand and counter real-world threats. She is actively involved in advancing experiential learning through initiatives such as the educational nonprofit CyberAuto Challenge and CyberDrone Challenge. One of her industrial control system independent research projects was featured in an episode on USA Network’s Mr. Robot and she speaks about legal and technical topics at conferences, has been on Off The Hook a few times, and written a “Hacker Perspective” in 2600: The Hacker Quarterly.

Michael Raymond is a vCISO, CISM, cybersecurity educator, and hardware tinkerer focused on making security and privacy approachable through hands-on projects. He has produced cybersecurity education for Hak5, Null Byte, and other security communities. His recent work focuses on privacy hardware, IoT security, community-based education, and open-source tools that help people understand the invisible networks around them.

redshiftzero is the chief technology officer at Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF), where she oversees the organization’s engineering teams. She is an engineer, researcher, and cypherpunk. Prior to this role she worked on applied cryptography for privacy-preserving payments and previously led development for the SecureDrop whistleblower platform. She is a recovering physicist and holds a doctorate in astrophysics from the University of Chicago.

Brandon Roberts is an investigative journalist at ProPublica who uses data and code to hold power to account. His investigative projects have been recognized as a Pulitzer Prize finalist in investigative reporting, cited by the ACLU, and have supported countless reporters at the local and national level.

Alexander Rodriguez is a senior security engineer focused on detection and response. He builds detection pipelines, incident response automation, and endpoint security tooling, and is currently developing open-source monitoring and prevention frameworks for AI coding agents using OpenTelemetry and Claude Code hooks. He has spent his career in defensive security across biotech, e-commerce, healthcare, and higher education.

David Schachter was a drone at Microsoft, Oracle, and Disney. Now he works to give people the opportunities he had in 1975, empowering people to take control of their digital lives. He wants the Star Trek future, not Terminator or RoboCop, and is tired of waiting for politicians to catch up.

Terry “shoot3r” Schanno (NV0O) is an amateur radio operator and builder focused on making RF experimentation accessible through hands-on, unconventional approaches. He is the founder of the “Can It Ham?” contest at DEF CON’s Ham Radio Village. Terry has early roots in hacker culture through 2600 meetings and has published contributions in 2600: The Hacker Quarterly. His background is in network engineering and systems infrastructure.

Laura Sang Hee Scherling, EdD, is a lecturer at Columbia University in the Technology Policy and Innovation Concentration. Scherling is the founder of the Cyber Care Institute and cofounder of Civic Art Lab. The Future of Hacking: The Rise of Cybercrime and the Fight to Keep Us Safe (Bloomsbury, 2025) is her fourth book. Scherling is passionate about tech ethics, Internet freedom, and cybersecurity awareness and has been researching scam compounds for several years.

Jenn Schiffer is an artist, web developer, and community expert who has spoken across the globe about JavaScript, ethics, and art. Formerly the director of community at Glitch/Fastly, she is on a corporate hiatus to make karaoke worse with Jamie Brew, and candles cooler through her company Bugs Rock.

Winn Schwartau has lived cybersecurity and warping minds since 1983. His creative and original thinking has inspired decades of predictions about the Internet, technology, privacy, and security, which have been scarily spot on. He coined the term “electronic Pearl Harbor” in 1991 and has authored a wide array of publications, including the seminal book, Information Warfare. Now he takes on cognitive security in his new book, The Art and Science of Metawar. He examines how humans must strengthen our cognitive defenses against AI-driven reality distortion, TMI/disinformation, manipulation, and algorithmic addictions. He currently spends much of his time as director of special projects for the Cognitive Security Institute. He is especially interested in the intersection of cybersecurity and cognitive security.

Jon Sharp is the founder of FRST Computer, where he builds human-scale, low-power computing hardware running a Plan 9-inspired stack. Radicalized by UNIX through a career spanning network engineering, enterprise software, and embedded systems, he is constantly seeking to prove that old tech is still good tech. He is the author of 9p4z, an open-source 9P implementation for the Zephyr RTOS, and really, he’s just trying to get back to the “old” Internet.

Rich Skrenta is a hacker and entrepreneur. Rich supposedly wrote the first computer virus when he was 15 (“Elk Cloner” for the Apple II). He has worked in Unix system internals and web search for decades. More recently, he has been pursuing archival projects related to the web and early command-line computing culture.

Tony Spencer (denzuko) is a 25-year infosec practitioner, principal at Da Planet Security, technology chair of Restore The Fourth (national), and chapter head of RT4 Albany. He is an ex-member of Legion of Apocalypse and Hackers.com.

Daniel Temkin created languages like Entropy, FatFinger, and Folders, collected recently in Forty-Four Esolangs: The Art of Esoteric Code (MIT Press), the first artist’s monograph of esolangs. His blog and interview series esoteric.codes has received numerous awards and grants, including The Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant (ArtsWriters.org). It was written in residence at the New Museum’s NEW INC incubator, and exhibited at the ZKM museum.

Mikael Thalen is a tech reporter for Straight Arrow News specializing in hackers, data breaches, and surveillance. Prior to joining Straight Arrow News, he reported for the Daily Dot, where he revealed the exposure of the U.S. government’s secretive No Fly List, an investigation that prompted a congressional inquiry.

Jamie Theophilos is a longtime community organizer, multimedia maker, educator, and researcher. Jamie has written on topics related to online visibility, social conflict, and politics of safety, and is involved in various grassroots efforts around confronting surveillance and building resilient communities both online and offline. They are a doctoral candidate at the Media School at Indiana University, Bloomington where their dissertation is on a critical cultural history of doxing.

Jon Thompson is the CTO of Liberty in North Korea, an international NGO focused on rescuing North Korean refugees and information access within North Korea. Prior to his role at LiNK his career was focused on cybersecurity across a number of sectors including tech, finance, retail, banking, and government. He has spent seven years working on the North Korean issue and firmly believes that North Korea will be open and free in our lifetime.

Lex Tungkasiri is a cyber researcher with experience in cybersecurity, open-source intelligence (OSINT), operational security, and digital investigations. He holds the GIAC Open Source Intelligence (GOSI) certification, has developed AI-powered cybersecurity and intelligence tools, and previously completed an engineering internship at the Naval Undersea Warfare Center (NUWC). He works with Trace Labs, where he leads investigators during missing-person search events and reviews intelligence before escalation to law enforcement. He also works in his school’s IT department and helps teach the cybersecurity program while contributing to curriculum development.

Alexander J. Urbelis is a CISO and cybersecurity attorney. He has been part of the information security community for more than 20 years and has deep and varied experience as a C-level officer in two of the world’s most distinguished international brands. Alex has also been in-house counsel, a private practice litigator, and a federal attorney.

Thom Vaughan is a principal engineer at the Common Crawl Foundation, where he works on data pipelines, archiving, and graph analysis for one of the web’s largest open datasets. Thom is based in London where he has been building things on the Internet for over 20 years and cares deeply about open data and reproducible research. He also contributes to web standards working groups and maintains numerous open-source software projects.

Vishakh is a software engineer focused on applied cryptography and privacy-preserving systems. His work explores what happens when advanced cryptographic techniques move from theory into deployed software. Vishakh is currently working on Monadic DNA, a secure and anonymous personal genomics app.

Rachel Vrabec is the founder and CEO of Kanary, an industry-leading attack surface management company protecting people’s digital lives at scale. A Northwestern University graduate, she built her technical foundation at IBM and Civis Analytics, the data science firm born out of the Obama for America campaigns. Watching the Cambridge Analytica scandal and DNC hack unfold from inside that world convinced her that personal privacy needed a dedicated defender. She has been building privacy and security software since 2017, earning a YC grant, a spot in Mozilla Builders, and backing from the founders of DataDog, GitHub, and 2048 Ventures. Her work has been featured in Forbes, Rolling Stone, The Washington Post, and The New York Times.

Justin Walters (nethound) is a Baltimore-based security professional whose last six years have been spent roughly evenly between ransomware incident response, detection engineering, and threat intelligence. He has worked dozens of ransomware engagements from the response side, an experience that has left him with strong opinions about Windows internals and a long list of artifacts threat actors should stop ignoring. He builds open-source security tooling in Rust, Go, and Python, writes about DFIR at deaddisk.com, and maintains a public technical garden at garden.nethound.sh.

Yi Wang is a creative technology designer in New York, working across accessibility, multisensory design, embodied interaction, and creative technology. Her work combines physical prototyping, software systems, and material experimentation to explore how technology can support different ways of perceiving, feeling, and engaging with the world. Her current project investigates how music can move beyond hearing through tactile and visual translation, reframing accessibility as a space for aesthetic invention.

John Williams is a fixer and hostile environment expert. He was the source for the ProPublica article “The Militia and the Mole” by Josh Kaplan. He has worked with outlets including The New York Times, Wired, The Guardian, and Rolling Stone.

Erica Windisch has been working in cloud computing, security, sandboxing multi-tenant environments, containers, observability, and serverless computing for over 25 years. She is now working on building open federated, access-enabling technologies and continuously learning AI infrastructure. She is a former maintainer and contributor to the OpenStack and Docker projects, and is a serial exited founder.

Calliope Youngblood has most recently been a coder for the Clerk of the U.S. House of Representatives. Since being fired for “too many prototypes” in 2023, they are exploring new languages as a deployment engineer, using NixOS, NuShell, Elixir, and Rust. You can find them exploring hacker spaces and open-mic scenes as a cyber nomad.