Jameel Jaffer Biography

Jameel Jaffer is a human rights and civil liberties attorney who is deputy legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union and director of the ACLU's Center for Democracy, which houses the ACLU’s work relating to free speech, privacy, technology, national security, and international human rights. Since he joined the staff of the ACLU in 2002, Jaffer has litigated many leading cases relating to national security and human rights, including cases concerning surveillance, torture, rendition, and “targeted killing.”

Jaffer is particularly notable for the role he played in litigating Freedom of Information Act requests that led to the release of documents concerning the torture of prisoners held at Guantanamo Bay and in CIA black sites. Among the documents released were interrogation directives signed by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, emails written by FBI agents who witnessed the torture of prisoners, legal memos in which the Office of Legal Counsel stated that U.S. law did not prohibit the President from authorizing torture, and autopsy reports relating to prisoners who were killed in U.S. custody. The New York Times billed the lawsuit "one of the most successful in the history of public disclosure."

In 2013, Jaffer co-led the litigation that resulted in the disclosure of one of the Obama administration's "drone memos."

Jaffer is an Executive Editor of Just Security, a national security blog.

On June 29th, 2016, Jaffer was named the founding director of the First Amendment Institute (at Columbia University), which was created to work to preserve and expand freedoms in the digital age. The institute, which will be affiliated with Columbia and involve faculty from its journalism and law schools, will seek to help lawyers navigating First Amendment issues related to new technology and support First Amendment-related research and education. And it will touch on a range of First Amendment issues, such as government surveillance, privacy rights on digital platforms and public access to government records.

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