Jennifer Lynch

Jennifer Lynch

General Counsel

Jennifer Lynch is EFF's General Counsel. Through this role, she advises EFF on matters related to 501(c)(3) status, employment, contracts, lobbying, immigration, IP, defamation, and just about any other legal issue that might arise for the leading nonprofit defending digital privacy, free speech, and innovation. She also serves as Secretary to EFF's Board of Directors.

Before becoming GC, Jennifer was EFF's Surveillance Litigation Director and led the organization's legal work challenging government abuse of search and seizure technologies through litigation in state and federal courts, including the U.S. Supreme Court. Jennifer also founded EFF's Street Level Surveillance Project, which informs advocates, defense attorneys, and decisionmakers about new police tools. In 2017, the First Amendment Coalition awarded her its Free Speech and Open Government Award for her years-long litigation against the Los Angeles Police and Sheriff's Departments seeking access to Automated License Plate Reader (ALPR) records and for setting new precedent in California's public records law. In 2019, the Daily Journal named her to its annual list of Top 100 Lawyers in California, and in 2021, the Daily Journal further named her to its list of top lawyers of the decade for her work "guarding privacy in an over-policed world." Jennifer has written influential white papers on forensic genetic genealogy searches, law enforcement use of face recognition, and biometric data collection in immigrant communities. She has also published articles on forensic genetic genealogy searches with the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers (NACDL) and on suspicionless police searches of consumer data as part of the Hoover Institution's Aegis Paper Series. She speaks frequently at legal and technical conferences as well as to the general public on technologies like location tracking, biometrics, and AI, and has testified on facial recognition before committees in the Senate and House of Representatives. She is regularly consulted as an expert on these subjects and others by major and technical news media. Jennifer attended U.C. Berkeley for undergrad and law school and clerked for Judge A. Howard Matz (now retired) in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California. Jennifer was an art major and photographer before the creativity of the law sucked her in.

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