Whistleblowers
TYLER SHULTZ
Tyler Shultz (@TylerShultz_) is the whistleblower who first raised the alarm on Elizabeth Holmes’s $10 billion biotech company, Theranos. Tyler alerted public health regulators in New York and was a source for a series of Wall Street Journal articles exposing Theranos’ dubious blood-testing practices. Tyler Shultz is currently the CEO of Flux Biosciences, and serves on the Board of Advisors for The Signals Network.
Dr. Jack Poulson
Dr. Jack Poulson (@_jack_poulson) is the Executive Director of tech accountability nonprofit Tech Inquiry. After two years as a Research Scientist in Google’s AI division working on recommendation systems and natural language processing, he resigned in protest of the company rolling back its international human rights protections. His current work focuses on data curation of the interface between tech companies and weapons manufacturers with the US government and supporting civil society and tech workers in opposing related abuses.
Ifeoma Ozoma
Ifeoma Ozoma (@IfeomaOzoma) is a tech policy expert with experience leading global public policy partnerships, content safety development, and policymaker engagement at Pinterest, Facebook, and Google. She left Pinterest after speaking out about racial and gender discrimination and retaliation at the organization. She is the Founder and Principal of Earthseed, a consulting firm advising individuals, organizations, and companies on the issues of tech accountability, public policy, health misinformation, and related communications. Ifeoma is a co-sponsor of the Silenced No More Act. This legislation, authored by CA State Senator Connie Leyva, will allow every individual in California to share information about discrimination or harassment they have faced on the job, even after signing an NDA.
Erika Cheung
Erika Cheung (@ErikaMCheung) was one of the key whistleblowers in the Theranos scandal that stopped the company from processing thousands of patients samples with faulty technology. After working for biotechnology companies, she committed herself to grow the entrepreneurial ecosystem in Hong Kong and throughout Asia. She helped launch Betatron, a startup accelerator based in Hong Kong. She is also an advisor for a number of VC firms helping biotech and healthcare companies in emerging markets. She is now the co-founder and executive director of Ethics in Entrepreneurship, a nonprofit with the mission of fostering ethical culture and systems for stakeholders in startup ecosystems. She graduated from UC Berkeley with a dual degree in cellular and molecular biology and linguistics.
Meredith Whittaker
Meredith Whittaker (@mer__edith) is the Minderoo Research Professor at New York University and the Faculty Director of the AI Now Institute at NYU. Prior to NYU, she worked at Google for over a decade, where she led product and engineering teams, founded Google’s Open Research Group, and co-founded M-Lab. As a long-time tech worker, she also helped lead labor organizing at Google and was a central organizer of the Google Walkout. She continues to work in solidarity with organizers in tech.
Lawyers
Ben Wizner
Ben Wizner (@benwizner) is the director of the ACLU’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project. For two decades, he has worked at the intersection of civil liberties and national security. He appears regularly in the global media, has testified before Congress, and is an adjunct professor at New York University School of Law. Since July of 2013, he has been the principal legal advisor to NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. He also serves on the Board of Advisors for The Signals Network.
Mary Inman
Mary Inman (@MaryInman94) is a partner from Constantine Cannon. After over 20 years representing whistleblowers in the US, she moved to London in July 2017 to launch the firm’s international whistleblower practice. She specializes in representing whistleblowers from the UK, EU and worldwide under the American whistleblower reward programs and is a recognized expert on the international application of the American whistleblower laws, financial frauds, health care reimbursement and government procurement.
Leah Judge
Leah Judge (@LawyerLeahSF) is an associate in Constantine Cannon’s San Francisco office. She represents whistleblowers and government entities in qui tam lawsuits brought under the Federal and various state False Claims Acts, as well as under the Internal Revenue Service, Securities and Exchange Commission, Commodity Futures Trading Commission, and Department of Transportation’s whistleblower programs.
Ashley Kissinger
Ashley Kissinger (@ashleykissinger) is a Media Lawyer at Ballard Spahr LLP and has represented media and entertainment companies, journalists, online speakers, and other content creators in First Amendment and related matters for over 20 years in 15 states and in the District of Columbia. Ashley is widely recognized as a thought leader on anonymous online speech law. She has also drafted proposed amendments to press laws, helped reporters develop a code of ethics, and taught free expression law to lawyers, editors, and journalists in Yemen, Kuwait, Jordan, and elsewhere in the region.
Tom Devine
Tom Devine is the Legal Director for the Government Accountability Project, and has worked at the organization since 1979. Since that time, Tom has formally or informally assisted over 7,000 whistleblowers. Tom has also been a leader in the campaigns to pass or defend 36 national or international whistleblower laws, including nearly all federal whistleblower laws in the US, enacted over the last two decades. Tom has authored or co-authored numerous books, including 2011’s The Corporate Whistleblowers Survival Guide: A Handbook for Committing the Truth, which won the 2012 International Business Book of the Year Award at the Frankfurt Book Fair.
Steve Kohn
Stephen M. Kohn (@KKCWhistleblow) is widely recognized as one of the nation’s leading qui tam and whistleblower attorneys. His record of winning whistleblower cases dates back to 1984, and he was peer-review rated by the National Law Journal as one of the 50-top plaintiff’s lawyers in the United States. Steve helped draft key whistleblower legislation and regulatory rules, including those incorporated into the Sarbanes–Oxley Act, Dodd–Frank Act, the IRS Qui Tam whistleblower amendments, and Whistleblower Protection Enhancement Act. His most recent book is The New Whistleblower’s Handbook: A Step-by-Step Guide to Doing What’s Right and Protecting Yourself. In 1988 he helped found the National Whistleblower Center, where he currently serves, pro bono, as Chairman of the Board.
Peter Rukin
Peter Rukin (@PeterRukin) is a partner in Rukin Hyland & Riggin LLP. Peter specializes in complex employment litigation, with a focus on class wage and hour litigation, equal employment opportunity claims, and the representation of executive and professional employees in employment matters. Peter is immediate past Chair of the Bar Association of San Francisco Labor & Employment Section Executive Committee and is a former member of the State Bar of California Labor & Employment Section Executive Committee.
Organizers
Daniel Gross
Daniel Gross (@dgorganize) is a long-time labor organizer and strategist with a focus on unions which are led and directly operated by workers themselves. In the tech industry, Daniel provides coaching to a wide range of workers from rideshare drivers to AI scientists on workplace organizing that aims at broad societal change and prioritizes the leadership and demands of marginalized workers. Trained as an attorney, Daniel is the co-author of Labor Law for the Rank & Filer: Building Solidarity While Staying Clear of the Law and Solidarity Unionism at Starbucks. He founded and was the first executive director of Brandworkers, the first worker center for specialty food manufacturing workers and co-founded the IWW Starbucks Workers Union while he was a barista at the company.
Wes McEnany
Wes McEnany (@WesMcEnany) is a Union Organizer for CODE-CWA, an initiative he co-launched to organize in the technology and games sectors. He was a key strategist in the launching of the Alphabet Workers Union. He has over a decade of experience in innovative union campaigning such as the Fight For $15 and national hospital organizing drives.
