Fellows

Meet the the people behind OTF. Our Team, Advisory Council, and Fellows are a large community of people who speak dozens of languages, are from all over the world, know a lot about Internet freedom, support hundreds of projects, and know how to make yours succeed.

Ain Ghazal

Fellow

Ain Ghazal is an Information Controls Fellow working with the Open Observatory of Network Interference (OONI) to study Censorship Resistance Systems in global VPN infrastructure. Ain’s OTF Fellowship at OONI intends to start measuring VPN interference at a global scale, with a focus on understanding how to quantify tunnel usability. Beyond observing success rates of […]

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Alexandra Dirksen

Fellow

Alexandra Dirksen is an ICFP fellow in collaboration with Censored Planet. She is a PhD student at the Institute of Application Security (TU Braunschweig, Germany) and investigates the presence of covert state-level attackers on the Web PKI. Web PKI is designed to protect users’ communications on the Internet from being intercepted by malicious actors. However, […]

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Amir Gh

Fellow

Amir is an Information Controls Fellow working with Jigsaw to develop tools to measure and report network level attacks intended to disrupt data flow and censorship mechanisms.

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Anonymous ICFP Fellow

Fellow

This ICFP Fellow is working on a tool to help identify applications that infringe on user privacy at the network level. While existing efforts have mostly focused on analysis of apps and devices, this approach seeks to utilize network-traffic monitoring to enhance efforts to identify the presence of such software.

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Ben Mixon-Baca

Fellow

Ben Mixon-Baca is a Senior ICFP fellow with Breakpointing Bad, and a PhD student from Arizona State University. He has previously worked on a range of projects including developing and deploying systems to detect threats to at-risk people and NGOs, developing tools and systems to automatically detect vulnerabilities in network traffic, and developing exploits against […]

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Chiang Min-yen

Fellow

Information Controls Fellow Chiang Min-yen has held a research position at Secdev Group since November 2023 and specializes in the long-term research domain of the international political economy of semiconductors. He has also been extensively involved in regional human rights activism in East Asia, with a particular focus on China’s aggression toward peripheral democracies. To […]

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Information Controls Fellow

Fellow

Investigating China’s censorship landscape via public job advertisements, as well as the implications of new technologies and the decentralization of censorship power on information-control strategies. This fellow is investigating China’s censorship landscape with public job-ads data, and is attempting to provide a more comprehensive understanding of the dynamics and intricacies of the censorship practice from […]

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Josh Beaker

Fellow

Information Controls Fellow Josh is working with the University of Washington to examine on-device information controls. His fellowship aims to examine information controls in modern phones in information-restricted countries where it concerns the privacy, access, and security of users in relation to the hardware/firmware (system design) of popular devices. If device manufacturers are capable of […]

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Melinda Cohoon

Fellow

Melinda Cohoon is an ICFP fellow collaborating with the Miaan Group. She is a PhD candidate in Near & Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Washington writing her dissertation on gamers in Iran, World of Warcraft, and affect theory. Her current research with the help of Miaan investigates internet access conditions from the perspective […]

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Mona Wang

Fellow

Mona Wang is an ICFP fellow working with Citizen Lab to conduct an in-depth analysis of the WeChat application’s security and privacy practices. With over 1.2 billion monthly active users, WeChat is the most popular messaging and social media platform in China, and third in the world. For vulnerable populations that must use WeChat (for […]

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Sam Ju

Fellow

Information Controls Fellow Sam is a seasoned researcher focusing on the interplay between digital politics of the Chinese Communist Party and its effects on society and global power dynamics. Sam’s work spans a broad array of topics including human rights, internet governance, and cyber security within China’s digital landscape.  The project: The Great Firewall of […]

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Sana Habib

Fellow

Sana Habib is an Information Controls Fellow working with the Digital Rights Foundation (DRF) in Pakistan in collaboration with Washington & Lee University. She is a PhD student at Arizona State University and will investigate the most critical threat vectors in local Pakistani Android apps. The ongoing series of arbitrary arrests, attacks, raids, and growing […]

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Senka Hadzic

Fellow

Senka is an Information Controls Fellow hosted by the Critical Infrastructure Lab. Senka holds a PhD in telecommunications engineering and has been working on affordable connectivity solutions in the Global South for over a decade. Her fellowship aims to examine digital security aspects and resilience of last-mile connectivity solutions, such as community networks. The digital security […]

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