As part of Sunshine Week, the HSU Library along with Access Humboldt is excited to partner with the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) to offer this event as part of a series of Sunshine Week events in Arcata and Eureka. 

This forum will include a keynote by Shahid Buttar, Director of Grassroots Advocacy for EFF. Buttar is "a constitutional lawyer focused on the intersection of community organizing and policy reform as a lever to shift legal norms, with roots in communities across the country resisting mass surveillance." (EFF)

The forum will also include breakout sessions on Web Browser Privacy Settings, Smartphone Encryption, Virtual Private Networking, Encryption and Security, Digital Rights Management and more. 

Buttar graduated from Stanford Law School in 2003 and became immersed in the movement to stop the war in Iraq. He is a constitutional lawyer “focused on the intersection of community organizing and policy reform as a lever to shift legal norms, with roots in communities across the country resisting mass surveillance.”

From 2009 to 2015, he led the Bill of Rights Defense Committee as executive director, and he has also championed causes including campaign finance reform, marriage equality for same-sex couples, and combatting racial and religious profiling of Muslims.

Outside of work, Buttar also “DJs and produces electronic music, writes poetry and prose, kicks rhymes, organizes guerilla poetry insurgencies, plays capoeira, speaks truth to power on Truthout, occasionally elucidates legal scholarship, and documents counter-cultural activism for the Burning Man Journal.”