Jason D. MacLeod

I am passionate about creating and theorizing at the intersections of law and technology.

Education

I have a non-traditional academic background that has given me a unique approach to life. Family circumstances pulled me out of school at 13 to take on caregiving at home. I wasn't home schooled and I never stepped foot in a high school. I taught myself the basic subjects covered in the GED (the U.S. high school equivalency diploma), which I passed at 16. 16 was the age that I moved out on my own. It was a minute before I started attending Seattle Central Community College.

Due to my community college grades, the Husky Promise, and the BAVA Endowed Scholarship, I received a full ride to the University of Washington. There I focused solely on law, human rights, geography, and philosophy. I graduated with a B.A. in Political Science magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa. Due to my love of the law and subtle ignorance of what law school entailed, I decided to earn a law degree instead of a PhD.

I attended Seattle University School of Law from 2009–2012. I focused on international law, intellectual property law, human rights law, and environmental law. My work drew on critical legal scholarship and human geography, examining how legal and economic systems can entrench inequality and environmental harm, and how they might be redesigned to do the opposite. I am incredibly fortunate to have studied closely with, and to have the continued mentorship of, one of the founders of Critical Race Theory and one of the most cited legal scholars in history: Richard Delgado and his wife and co-author Jean Stefancic. I also worked closely with civil rights pioneer and the first Black tenured professor at both UCLA and Seattle University, Professor Hank McGee. Finally, I wouldn't have finished law school without the two-year fellowship at the law school's Films for Justice Institute, founded and run by legal scholar Marilyn Berger, and the steady support of legal writing professor Janet Dickson.

After graduating law school, I decided to prepare for a PhD in Geography by attending the University of Oxford. Oxford's Geography Department is consistently ranked #1 in the world as well as the university itself. I couldn't believe that someone like me with a middle school education could attend Oxford.

After realizing the PhD would be yet another four years of school, I finished my education at the Berkeley School of Law in the LL.M program. There, my work focused on environmental law, intellectual property, computer crime, and human rights law. As with Oxford, this was another school consistently ranked the best in the world. After graduating, I had a one year fellowship at the Human Rights Center at the law school. This fellowship, and my colleagues at the Center, specifically Alexa Koenig, changed my life. It was during this time that I saw the power technology has, especially information security and privacy, in the fight for justice and civil rights. The law was not enough to affect the change I wanted to make in the world. With this realization, I saw my lifelong interest in hacking combine with my legal work.

Information Security

I've had a lifelong fascination with security and how systems work. Today I am a Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP), Certified Ethical Hacker (CEH), and a Certified Information Privacy Professional (CIPP/US). During my tenure at the Human Rights Center, I noticed a knowledge gap between technologists, lawyers, activists, and policymakers. To address this gap, I chose to forego the academic and legal track and instead opted to gain hands on experience by working full time in the technology sector. Since 2014, I have worked in both the private and public sectors developing hands-on expertise in applications used for big data visualization, forensics, threat intelligence, user behavior analytics (big data artificial intelligence surveillance), malware analysis, security operations, and penetration testing.

For a time I worked inside the machine. While at Deloitte I helped some of the largest corporations on earth, across pharmaceuticals, medical devices, finance, and Big Tech, mature their security programs: best-in-class teams, multi-million-dollar budgets, intellectual property locked down across the most regulated industries in the world. As a data privacy and cybersecurity attorney at an AmLaw 100 firm, I specialized in incident response and compliance, coordinating forensic investigations under attorney-client privilege and determining the legal conclusions around data-breach regulation for clients of every size. My compliance work was mostly U.S.-based (HIPAA, FCRA, GLBA, COPPA, and state privacy regulations), with some GDPR, PIPL, and BDSG, and I drafted the crisis playbooks (Incident Response, Business Continuity, and Disaster Recovery Plans) that keep capital safe. I watched, up close, how power teaches itself to stay safe. I don't regret those years. They taught me exactly how the machine holds itself together. I'd just rather hand those same tools to everyone else.

Everywhere else, I've worked for people instead of profit. At Internews I blended my security and legal work into a single program protecting the most courageous activists and journalists in the world's most dangerous and authoritarian countries, the people that power is built to outlast. That's the work that matters to me.

Music

Under the name dj advent, I spent over a decade in Seattle's underground electronic music and performing-arts scene, from warehouse parties to club residencies, playing more than 250 events. I came up through the South Asian and Arabic-influenced electronic sound (Asian Underground, Asian Massive, Arabtronica) and signed with Six Degrees Records. These days I make mixes more than I play out. You can read the full story and listen here.

Practice

I have studied both Chinese and Japanese martial arts. I was an Uchi-Deshi of Aikido Sensei Koichi Barrish of the Kannagara Dojo, an 8th-generation Shinto priest and Head Priest of the Tsubaki Grand Shrine of America. I studied Shinobi Gummi Aikijutsu with Sid Woodcock, Baguazhang and O'mei Shan Qigong with Andy Dale, Traditional Yang Style Taijiquan with LeRoy Clark (inner-door student of Fu Shen Yuan, son of Fu Zhongwen), and Tien Shan Qigong with Fook Yeung. My daily practice, when I'm at my best, centers on Vipassana meditation and yoga (Hatha, Yin, Restorative, Vinyasa, and Ashtanga).

Open to

The day job keeps me busy, but I still say yes to work worth doing: speaking, writing, the occasional advisory role, on privacy, cybersecurity, AI governance, surveillance, and the technology that gets used on people who can't push back. I'm picky about it. If that's your terrain, find me here.