Jennifer Lynch

AFFILIATED SCHOLAR

Jennifer Lynch is the General Counsel at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), the leading nonprofit defending privacy, free speech, and innovation in the digital world. In her programmatic work, Jennifer challenges government abuse of search and seizure technologies in courts and legislatures and has argued to protect privacy in civil and criminal cases around the country. Jennifer founded EFF's Street Level Surveillance Project, which informs advocates, defense attorneys, and decisionmakers about new police tools. She received the First Amendment Coalition’s 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. She has been named in the Daily Journal’s annual list of Top 100 Lawyers in California, and has also been listed as one of the top California 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.