Timothy H. EdgarTimothy H. Edgar defended privacy after 9/11 as a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union before going inside America's growing surveillance state as the deputy for civil liberties in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence—a stry he tells in Beyond Snowden: Privacy, Mass Surveillance and the Struggle to Reform the NSA. Edgar then moved to the White House to advise the National Security Council on cybersecurity policy, in a job that President Barack Obama announced in 2009 that was “specifically dedicated to safeguarding the privacy and civil liberties of the American people.”

In 2013, Edgar left government for Brown University, where he is a Senior Fellow at the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs. Edgar helped put together Brown's Executive Master in Cybersecurity and is on the advisory board of Virtru, an encryption software company. Edgar is a contributing editor to Lawfare and his work has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, the Guardian, Foreign Affairs, and Wired. Edgar is a graduate of Harvard Law School and Dartmouth College.