Jon is a legal scholar and social scientist who does research at the intersection of law, technology, and human rights.  Based in Toronto, he teaches as an Associate Professor at Osgoode Hall Law School and is a long time Faculty Associate of Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society  and Research Fellow at the Citizen Lab based at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy. This year, he is also a Visiting Scholar at Harvard’s Institute for Rebooting Social Media. In recent years, he has spent time as a Senior Research Fellow on the Technology and Social Change Project at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics, and Public Policy and as a Research Affiliate of Princeton’s Center for Information Technology Policy.

Originally from Halifax, Nova Scotia, Jon has studied law at Columbia Law School as a Fulbright Scholar and at Oxford as a Mackenzie King Travelling Scholar. He holds a doctorate in “Information, Communication, and the Social Sciences” from the interdisciplinary Oxford Internet Institute at the University of Oxford (Balliol College). His work aims to understand technology’s role in censorship, surveillance, legal enforcement, online abuse, and other public and private sector legal and regulatory contexts, in particular the impact on human rights. His doctoral research, for example, explored how social, corporate, and regulatory activities contribute to chilling effects online through a series of empirical legal case studies like how online surveillance impacts or “chills” people activities online.

Jon’s work has received national and international attention and press coverage, including the Washington Post, Reuters International, New York Times, Newsweek, TIME Magazine, NBC News, Forbes, Psychology Today, Le Monde, The Guardian, The Daily Mail, Freitag, Il Fatto Quotidiano, The Times of India, Indian Express, Jerusalem Post, Russia Today, Huffington Post, Politico, Slate, Motherboard, The Hill, The Index on Censorship, as well as coverage by Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Glenn Greenwald in The Intercept.

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