Alex Abdo
Litigation Director, Knight Institute
Alex Abdo is the litigation director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University. He has been involved in the conception and litigation of most of the Institute’s legal challenges.
His work has focused most recently on challenges to the use of spyware to intimidate journalists, the secrecy of the Office of Legal Counsel’s legal opinions, the digitization of mail in jails and prisons, and the legal threats issued by social media platforms to researchers hoping to illuminate the influence that the platforms are having on society. He was also involved in the Institute’s prior challenges to the government’s system of “prepublication review,” which requires millions of former employees of the intelligence agencies to submit their manuscripts to government censors prior to publication; the Institute’s groundbreaking challenge to the constitutionality of President Trump’s blocking of critics from his @realDonaldTrump Twitter account; and the Institute’s and the ACLU’s challenge to the constitutionality of the NSA’s program of “upstream surveillance,” under which the agency scans the content of U.S. persons’ international communications as they transit the internet backbone inside the United States.
Prior to joining the Institute, Abdo worked for eight years at the ACLU, where he was at the forefront of litigation relating to NSA surveillance, encryption, anonymous speech online, government transparency, and the post-9/11 abuse of detainees in U.S. custody. In 2015, he argued the appeal that resulted in the Second Circuit’s invalidation of the NSA’s call-records program.
Abdo graduated from Yale College and Harvard Law School. After law school, he clerked for the Honorable Barbara M.G. Lynn, U.S. District Judge for the Northern District of Texas, and for the Honorable Rosemary Barkett, U.S. Circuit Judge for the Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit.
Contact
Selected Projects
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Wikimedia Foundation v. NSA
A lawsuit challenging the NSA’s “Upstream” surveillance
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Knight Institute v. Trump
A lawsuit challenging President Trump's blocking of critics on Twitter
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Edgar v. Haines
A lawsuit challenging the government's system of "prepublication review"
Selected Work
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Analysis
Free Speech in Black Boxes
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Analysis
Facebook is shaping public discourse. We need to understand how
The Guardian
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The Supreme Court Takes On the Police Use of Cellphone Records
The New York Times
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Does the Warrantless Search and Seizure of Cellphone Records Violate the Fourth Amendment?
National Constitution Center
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Why Rely on the Fourth Amendment To Do the Work of the First?
The Yale Law Journal
Contact
Selected Projects
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Wikimedia Foundation v. NSA
A lawsuit challenging the NSA’s “Upstream” surveillance
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Knight Institute v. Trump
A lawsuit challenging President Trump's blocking of critics on Twitter
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Edgar v. Haines
A lawsuit challenging the government's system of "prepublication review"
Writings & Appearances
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Deep Dive
U.S. Courts Must Stop Shielding Government Surveillance Programs from Accountability
The NSA’s surveillance of Americans’ internet use raises serious constitutional concerns, but the government claims a lawsuit against the program would compromise “state secrets”
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Essays and Scholarship
How the Biden Administration and Congress Can Fix Prepublication Review: A Roadmap for Reform
Prepublication review is a sweeping and broken system in need of repair
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Essays and Scholarship
A Safe Harbor for Platform Research
Knight Institute policy paper proposes legal protection for certain research and newsgathering projects focused on platforms
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Institute Update
Institute Releases New Tool to Track OLC Opinions
@OLCforthepeople will tweet every time the Office of Legal Counsel publishes an opinion in its reading room
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Deep Dive
Judicial Secrecy: How to fix the over-sealing of federal court records
The time has come for the courts to adopt a uniform procedure for sealing that protects the public’s right of access to court records