Jon is a lawyer, former doctoral student at the Oxford Internet Institute, and a Research Fellow at the Citizen Lab / Canada Centre for Global Security Studies, an interdisciplinary research lab specializing in digital media, cyber-security, and human rights, at the University of Toronto‘s Munk School for Global Affairs.
In 2011, he was also a Google Policy Fellow at the Citizen Lab, where he led the ONI Transparency Project, a new project under the Open Net Initiative, a research collaboration between the Lab and the Berkman Center at Harvard University, which examines global Internet censorship and surveillance. He was also Project Coordinator for the Privacy Value Networks Project, a large scale, multi-university EPSRC funded project on data privacy, led by the OII’s Ian Brown.
A native Nova Scotian and graduate of Dalhousie, he previously studied at Columbia Law School as a Fulbright Scholar and at Oxford, where he was associate editor of the Oxford University Commonwealth Law Journal and a Mackenzie King Travelling Scholar. In 2009-2010, he taught law as a Senior Research Fellow and Lecturer at Victoria University in Wellington, New Zealand. And before all that, he worked as a litigation lawyer and, from time to time, as a policy advisor at the federal level.
His research, broadly speaking, concerns constitutional (human rights) law, intellectual property, and digital media policy, particularly censorship, privacy, and security.
Technology law, intellectual property, public and constitutional law, copyright, public domain, virtual worlds.
