Our Fourth Amendment rights are under attack in the digital age, and EFF is proud to announce that human rights attorney and racial justice activist Jumana Musa has joined our advisory board, bringing great expertise to our fight defending users’ privacy rights.

Musa is Director of the Fourth Amendment Center at the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers (NACDL), where she oversees initiatives to challenge Fourth Amendment violations and outdated legal doctrines that have allowed the government and law enforcement to rummage, with little oversight or restrictions, through people’s private digital files.

The Fourth Amendment Center provides assistance and training for defense attorneys handling cases involving surveillance technologies like geofencing, Stingrays that track people’s digital locations, facial recognition, and more.

In a recent episode of EFF’s How to Fix the Internet podcast, Musa said an important goal in achieving privacy protections for users is to build case law to remove the “third party doctrine.” This is the judge-created legal tenant that metadata—names of people you called or called you, websites you visited, or your location—held by third parties like Internet providers, phone companies, or email services, isn’t private and therefore isn’t protected by the Fourth Amendment. Police are increasingly using spying tools in criminal investigations to gather metadata in whole communities or during protests, Musa said, a practice that disproportionately affects black and indigenous people, and communities of color.

Prior to joining NACDL, Ms. Musa was a policy consultant for the Southern Border Communities Coalition, comprised of over 60 groups across the southwest organized to help immigrants facing brutality and abuse by border enforcement agencies and support a human immigration agenda.

Previously, as Deputy Director for the Rights Working Group, a national coalition of civil rights, civil liberties, human rights, and immigrant rights advocates, Musa coordinated the “Face the Truth” campaign against racial profiling. She was also the Advocacy Director for Domestic Human Rights and International Justice at Amnesty International USA, where she addressed the domestic and international impact of U.S. counterterrorism efforts on human rights. She was one of the first human rights attorneys allowed to travel to the naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and served as Amnesty International's legal observer at military commission proceedings on the base. 

Welcome to EFF, Jumana!