Switzerland-based privacy startup Nym Technologies is proud to announce today that renowned attorney and law professor Ahmed Ghappour is joining as General Counsel.
Ghappour is a professor at Boston University School of Law, where his teaching and scholarship focus is at the intersection of privacy, security and technology. He published a seminal paper in the Stanford Law Review analyzing the legal implications of cross-border hacking and anonymous networks and is a frequent speaker and commentator on surveillance, privacy and security issues.
Prior to his academic career, Ghappour was also a human rights advocate in Egypt during the Arab Spring, and a staff attorney at Reprieve UK, where he represented over 40 Guantanamo prisoners. He started his legal career as a patent litigator where he leveraged technical skills developed as a computer engineer at Silicon Graphics, Inc., and Sun Microsystems.
He built law clinics at the University of Texas and the University of California to provide litigation support in national security and cybersecurity cases. In addition to representing digital causes célèbres such as Chelsea Manning, Ross Ulbricht and Barrett Brown, Ghappour litigated the first criminal case to challenge bulk metadata collection by the NSA under Section 215 of the Patriot Act, a secret surveillance program made infamous by Edward Snowden’s first public disclosure in 2014.
Ghappour first met Nym’s Harry Halpin and Claudia Diaz back in 2014 at the Computers, Privacy, and Data Protection conference in Brussels. “We stayed up all night discussing machine intelligence, cyber warfare, mass surveillance, and some of the very problems the Nym Network seeks to solve.”
“As a trained computer engineer with experience handling cases as serious as human rights abuses at Guantanamo and a deep understanding of surveillance and cross-jurisdictional matters, Ahmed is a perfect fit for Nym.” said Nym CEO Harry Halpin about the privacy start-up’s latest hire.
The addition of Ghappour, with a background of working in human rights and expertise in cybersecurity, further strengthens Nym’s core vision of offering global “cybersecurity from below” by protecting people’s privacy at the network layer. Nym is a decentralized and incentivised privacy network that protects against traffic analysis and metadata surveillance.
On joining a privacy-focused startup, Ghappour notes, “As our digital systems become more entangled with our lives, ordinary people need and deserve strong privacy protections. We finally have the technological solutions to end surveillance capitalism–decentralized applications with the right incentives. I’m looking forward to working with the Nym team and helping realize their vision.”
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