Rainey Reitman serves as president of the board of Freedom of the Press Foundation. She worked for the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) for 11 years, first as their Activism Director and then as their Chief Program Officer. Rainey also co-founded and served for six years as a steering committee member of the Chelsea Manning Support Network. She currently serves as a board member for the Filecoin Foundation for the Decentralized Web and runs a nonprofit consulting service called Groundwork Strategy.

Rainey’s advocacy has focused on defending the rights of whistleblowers, fighting mass government surveillance, and investigating how limiting access to financial services has been used to silence speakers. Among other projects, she played a key organizing role in projects such as the Tor Challenge, the SOPA blackouts, the Stop Watching Us coalition and their Rally Against Mass Surveillance, flying a protest blimp over the NSA data center in Utah, the Who Has Your Back reports comparing corporate policies about government access to user data, and producing EFF’s podcast, How to Fix the Internet. 

Laura Poitras is a filmmaker and journalist. Her film CITIZENFOUR, the third installment of her post-9/11 Trilogy, won an Academy Award for Best Documentary, along with awards from the British Academy of Film, Independent Spirit Awards, Director’s Guild of America, and Emmy Awards.

Her reporting on NSA mass surveillance shared in the 2014 Pulitzer Prize Public Service. She has been on a U.S. government secret watch list since 2006.  In 2015, the Electronic Frontier Foundation filed a FOIA lawsuit against the U.S. government to obtain her FBI files.

In 2016, she had her first solo museum exhibition at the Whitney Museum. Laura is the recipient of a 2012 MacArthur Fellowship, and is the co-creator and executive producer of Field of Vision. 

Wesley Lowery is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author and correspondent for CBS News. Lowery was previously a national correspondent at the Washington Post, specializing in issues of race and law enforcement. He led the team awarded the Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting in 2016 for the creation and analysis of a real-time database to track fatal police shootings in the United States. His most recent project, Murder With Impunity, an unprecedented look at unsolved homicides in major American cities, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2019. His first book, They Can’t Kill Us All: Ferguson, Baltimore and a New Era in America’s Racial Justice Movement, was a New York Times bestseller and was awarded the Christopher Isherwood Prize for Autobiographical Prose by the LA Times Book Prizes.

Azmat Khan is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter whose work grapples with the human costs of war.

She is an investigative reporter with the New York Times Magazine and is the Patti Cadby Birch Assistant Professor at Columbia Journalism School, where she also directs the Simon and June Li Center for Global Journalism.

Khan's investigations from Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan have prompted widespread policy impact and won more than a dozen awards, including the Pulitzer Prize, two National Magazine Awards, two Overseas Press Club awards, the Polk Award, and the Hillman Prize. 

Khan’s multi-part series in the New York Times, The Civilian Casualty Files, was awarded the 2022 Pulitzer Prize in International Reporting. Based on more than five years of reporting by Khan, the series laid bare how America’s campaign of so-called ‘precision strikes’ has been marked by deeply flawed intelligence, rushed and often imprecise targeting, and the deaths of thousands of civilians, many of them children. Khan sued the Department of Defense to obtain and analyze a trove of more than 1,300 formerly secret military casualty assessments. She also visited the sites of more than 100 civilian casualty incidents in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan — often tracking down individuals from the records — and conducting scores of interviews with airstrike survivors, their families, military officials, and intelligence informants.

Edward Snowden is a former intelligence officer who served the CIA, NSA, and DIA for nearly a decade as a subject matter expert on technology and cybersecurity. In 2013, he revealed the NSA was unconstitutionally seizing the private records of billions of individuals who had not been suspected of any wrongdoing, resulting in the largest debate about reforms to US surveillance policy since 1978. He has received awards for courage, integrity, and public service, and was named the top global thinker of 2013 by Foreign Policy magazine. Today, he works on methods of enforcing human rights through the application and development of new technologies. He joined the board of Freedom of the Press Foundation in February 2014 and served as board president from 2016 to 2022.

John Cusack is an actor, director, producer, and screenwriter who has appeared in over 60 films. He's also a political activist and regularly speaks out and writes on issues of human rights, government transparency, and accountability—amongst other things.

Trevor Timm is a co-founder and the executive director of Freedom of the Press Foundation. He is a journalist, activist, and legal analyst whose writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, USA Today, The Atlantic, Al Jazeera, Foreign Policy, Harvard Law & Policy Review, and Politico.

Trevor formerly worked as an activist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Before that, he helped the longtime general counsel of The New York Times, James Goodale, write a book on the Pentagon Papers and the First Amendment. He received his J.D. from New York Law School.

In 2013, he received the Hugh Hefner First Amendment Award for journalism.

Daniel Ellsberg co-founded Freedom of the Press Foundation. He was best known as the whistleblower who gave the Pentagon Papers to The New York Times in 1971. Ellsberg was also the author of three books: Papers on the War (1971), Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers (2002), and Risk, Ambiguity and Decision (2001). In December 2006, he won the Right Livelihood Award, known as the “Alternative Nobel Prize,” in Stockholm, Sweden, “for putting peace and truth first, at considerable personal risk, and dedicating his life to inspiring others to follow his example.”

Daniel Ellsberg passed away on June 16, 2023.

John Perry Barlow was a co-founder of the Freedom of the Press Foundation. He was also a retired Wyoming rancher (and native), a former lyricist for the Grateful Dead, and the co-founder and board member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a civil liberties organization which has been protecting the free flow of information on the Internet since 1990. He was a founding Fellow at Harvard Law School's Berkman Center for Internet and Society. He wrote about cyberspace since 1988 and was first to apply that name to the global social space it presently describes. Barlow's piece on the future of copyright, “The Economy of Ideas,” is taught in many law schools, and his “Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace” is posted on thousands of websites. The Guardian named him one of the twenty most influential champions of the Open Internet. He was the father of three daughters and his primary aspiration was to be a good ancestor. He dreamed of a world where all general useful knowledge can be available to anyone, of any station, merely for the price of curiosity.

John Perry Barlow passed away on February 7th, 2018.