Dissonance Speaker Series: Apple & the FBI Encryption, Security, and Civil Liberties

Moderated by Professor Alex Halderman of the College of Engineering, this panel features special guests, Nate Cardozo, senior staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Barbara McQuade, U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Michigan.

Nate Cardozo

Senior Staff Attorney

Nate is a Senior Staff Attorney on the Electronic Frontier Foundation's digital civil liberties team. In addition to his focus on free speech and privacy litigation, Nate works on EFF's Who Has Your Back? report and Coders' Rights Project. Nate has projects involving cryptography and the law, automotive privacy, government transparency, hardware hacking rights, anonymous speech, electronic privacy law reform, Freedom of Information Act litigation, and resisting the expansion of the surveillance state. A 2009-2010 EFF Open Government Legal Fellow, Nate spent two years in private practice before returning to his senses and to EFF in 2012. Nate has a B.A. in Anthropology and Politics from U.C. Santa Cruz and a J.D. from U.C. Hastings where he has taught first-year legal writing and moot court. He brews his own beer, has been to India four times, and watches too much Bollywood.

Barbara L. McQuade

U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Michigan

Barbara L. McQuade takes to heart former Attorney General Eric Holder's advice that Assistant U.S. Attorneys should be not just case processors, but community problem solvers. The U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Michigan says "we want to use the resources of the U.S. Attorney's Office to improve the quality of life for the people of Michigan."

For that reason, McQuade has set priorities to meet the district's current challenges: national security, violent crime, public corruption, civil rights and financial fraud, including mortgage fraud, health care fraud, and environmental crimes. McQuade, appointed by President Barack Obama, began serving in January 2010, by restructuring the office for the first time in more than 35 years. The goal was to align attorney resources with the priorities of the district.

"our work can have a significant impact on our region by improving public safety, deterring corruption, enforcing civil rights, combating fraud, and protecting our natural resources," McQuade says.

The first woman to serve as U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Michigan, McQuade was as an Assistant U.S. Attorney in Detroit for 12 years. She served as Deputy Chief of the National Security Unit, where she prosecuted cases involving terrorism financing, foreign agents, export violations, and threats. During her career as a federal prosecutor, Ms. McQuade has also prosecuted cases involving violent crime, fraud and racketeering.

Before joining the U.S. Attorney's Office, McQuade worked in private practice and served as a judicial law clerk. She and her husband have four children.