I am a law and technology, information studies, and surveillance studies scholar trained in Law (JD, UC Davis) and Information Science (PhD, Washington). Through my research, I try to understand the legal, ethical, and social implications of surveillance and information technologies in society, including issues of privacy and data protection, freedom of expression, technology regulation, information behavior, law enforcement and criminal procedure, irregular immigration, and border enforcement. I use legal, philosophical, and (qualitative) social science methods in my research. I have also dabbled as a documentary filmmaker. I am also a husband and proud father of six kids, which is much more meaningful than any of the buzzwords listed in the prior sentences.
My most recent book, Police Visibility: Privacy, Surveillance, and the False Promise of Body-Worn Cameras (University of California Press, 2021), was the winner of the Surveillance Studies Network’s 2022 Book Award for best academic monograph on surveillance published in 2021.
I am currently working on papers focused on issues of data privacy, data protection, the legal and social implications of police body-worn cameras, the concept of digital sanctuary, and the information-related foundations of surveillance.
I’ve created pages where you can find a summary of my work in the following areas (overlap exists; note that topics without active links are pending and will go live soon):
- Immigration, border enforcement, and humanitarian migrant-aid work
- Policing and body-worn camera adoption
- Copwatching and the First Amendment “right to record”
- Privacy and privacy law
- Criminal procedure (Fourth Amendment law)
- Information practices/information behavior/social informatics
- Privacy/surveillance through the lens of (neo)republican political philosophy
Formally, I am an Associate Professor and Petrone Fellow in the School of Journalism and Communication (SOJC) at the University of Oregon. I am also Director of the SOJC’s undergraduate Honors Program and am affiliated with the UO Center for Cyber Security and Privacy (CCSP) and the New Media and Culture Certificate (NMCC) program for graduate students. Beyond UO, I am a board member and Co-Director of the Surveillance Studies Network (SSN), the key academic organization for surveillance studies scholars around the world, and Dialogue Editor for the SSN’s academic journal, Surveillance & Society. I earned my PhD in Information Science from the University of Washington and my JD (law degree) from the University of California, Davis School of Law. At UO, I teach courses on media law, internet law and regulation, data ethics and justice, information policy, and cybercrime. My institutional page is available here.
In Summer 2024, I was appointed as a Senior Researcher with the Tilburg Institute for Law, Technology, and Society (TILT) at Tilburg University Law School (Netherlands), where I am working with Prof. Eleni Kosta on a project related to data protection and data retention law. I also previously worked at Utrecht University School of Law as a Senior Researcher working with Prof. Nadya Purtova from 2022 to 2023.
I was home-schooled throughout my entire K-12 education, working intermittently after school hours in a machine shop, at a grocery store, and for a small concrete-raising company to pay for concert tickets, CDs, and lift tickets. In college, I studied graphic design, photography, journalism, and video and film production. During that time, I worked on several film projects, including interning (for pay) as an electrician on the film Dark Matter, winner of the Alfred P. Sloan Prize at the 2007 Sundance Film Festival, where I helped light scenes for the likes of Meryl Streep and Aidan Quinn (see my IMDB entry here). I worked for several years as a video editor, producer, and cinematographer at a small video production studio in Salt Lake City, producing television commercials, music videos, corporate training videos, and one season of a cable television show. At that point, I decided to switch gears and become a lawyer and applied to law school.
During my time at UC Davis School of Law, I worked as a law clerk/legal intern for Geldards (a law firm in Cardiff, Wales, UK), the Civil Division of the US Attorney’s Office in Sacramento, California, and for Horan Lloyd (a law firm on California’s lovely central coast) where also I returned for several short stints after passing the bar exam. Although I enjoyed law school and legal research, I quickly realized I didn’t want to be a practicing lawyer. Motivated by my growing interest in research, I applied to PhD programs and completed my PhD in Information Science at the University of Washington’s Information School in Seattle while also producing a documentary film about migrant deaths along the US-Mexico border.
My research has been published in high-impact peer-reviewed social science journals (such as New Media & Society, Government Information Quarterly, Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology (JASIS&T), The Information Society, Law & Social Inquiry, Surveillance & Society, First Monday, and Journal of Criminal Justice); law reviews (including Indiana Law Journal, North Carolina Law Review, Hastings Law Journal, UC Irvine Law Review, and BYU Law Review); peer-reviewed, archival conference proceedings; and as chapters in several edited books. I have also edited three books:
- Police on Camera: Surveillance, Privacy, and Accountability (Routledge, 2021);
- Surveillance, Privacy and Public Space (Routledge, 2019); and
- Privacy in Public Space: Conceptual and Regulatory Challenges (Edward Elgar, 2017).
Prior to coming to the University of Oregon, I was an Assistant Professor at the University of Kentucky’s School of Information Science (with a joint appointment in Sociology) and, before that, a Post-Doctoral Researcher at the Tilburg Institute for Law, Technology, and Society (TILT) within the Law School at Tilburg University (in the Netherlands). I have also held additional temporary research positions with Utrecht University (2022-23) and Tilburg University (2018; 2019; 2024). I am licensed to practice law in California (currently inactive), and was a 2013 Google Policy Fellow, hosted by the Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic (CIPPIC) at the University of Ottawa Faculty of Law (Ottawa, Ontario).
My documentary and video production work has been exhibited at museums in the United States, Germany, and the Netherlands, and has been screened at film festivals and on university campuses across the United States. I have discussed my research on NPR (All Things Considered) and written about body-worn cameras for The Conversation and Slate. My research has been cited in a variety of academic journals as well as the New York Times Magazine.
