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Biographies of Speakers
 Printable Version of Bios (PDF)
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MICHAEL GEIST, Chair of B’nai Brith
Canada’s Third International Symposium
on Hate on the Internet, is a law professor
at the University of Ottawa where he holds
the Canada Research Chair in Internet and
E-commerce Law. He is the Ontario Co-
Chair of B’nai Brith’s League for Human
Rights and has authored numerous academic
articles and government reports on Internet law. He is an
internationally syndicated columnist on technology law issues |
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YAMAN AKDENIZ is an associate professor
at the School of Law, University of Leeds,
where he teaches and writes about Internetrelated
legal and policy issues. He is the
founder and director of Cyber-Rights and
Cyber-Liberties, a non-profit civil liberties
organization in the UK. Dr. Akdeniz was
recently an International Policy fellow of the Open Society Institute,
where he worked on a project involving the Turkish Government and
the development of an Information Society in Turkey. He has provided
oral testimony in front of governmental and NGO bodies, including
to the European Union, the United Nations, and the OSCE level,
regarding his work to combat racism on the Internet. His has been
widely published on such topics ranging from “The Dilemma of
Policing Cyberspace” and “The Internet, Law and Society”. His forthcoming
publications include “Internet Child Pornography” and “The
Law: National and International Responses”. |
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JANE BAILEY is an assistant professor at the
University of Ottawa, Faculty of Law, Common
Law Section. Prior to coming to the University
of Ottawa, Professor Bailey practised civil litigation
with Torys LLP. She assisted as co-counsel
for the complainant Sabina Citron in the first
Canadian human rights case involving the regulation
of Internet hate speech. Before beginning her legal practice, she
was a law clerk to Mr. Justice Sopinka of the Supreme Court of Canada.
Her current research interests centre on the impact of emerging communications
technologies on our ability to preserve fundamental public policies
relating to freedom of expression and equality. She has spoken and
written on topics such as Internet hate speech, online child pornography
and the impact of proposed copyright reforms on freedom of expression. |
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STEWART BELL, is the Chief Reporter for
the National Post, where he covers the national
security beat. A veteran investigative
reporter and foreign correspondent, he has
been writing about terrorism for more than 12
years, providing in-depth coverage and analysis
on this urgent and growing problem. He
has travelled on assignment through the Middle East, Afghanistan,
Pakistan, Asia and West Africa. He is the author of Cold Terror: How
Canada Nurtures and Exports Terrorism, and The Martyr’s Oath,
released last year, which documents a young Canadian’s coming of
age as an Al Qaeda terrorist. He has won many journalism awards,
including the Amnesty International Human Rights Media Award
and the B’nai Brith Canada Award. |
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RAPHAEL COHEN-ALMAGOR is the Director of the Center for Democratic Studies at the University of Haifa. He was the Fulbright
Visiting Professor at UCLA School of Law and Dept. of Communication, and Visiting Professor at Johns Hopkins University. He has been
involved in diverse capacities with several leading organizations, including the Chairperson of “The Second Generation to the Holocaust and Heroism Remembrance” Organization in Israel, Director of the Medical Ethics Think-tank at the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute, member of the Israel Press Council, member of UNESCO International Clearing House on Children and Violence on the Screen, as well as Chairperson of Library and Information Studies at the University of Haifa. To date, he has published twelve books, including one poetry book, and more than eighty refereed articles and book chapters on free expression, political extremism, Israeli democracy, media ethics, multiculturalism and medical ethics. |
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MICHAEL J. GENNACO currently serves as
Chief Attorney of the Office of Independent
Review of the Los Angeles Sheriff’s
Department. Prior to this, he served for over six
years as an Assistant United States Attorney for
the Central District of California. As Chief of the
Civil Rights Section, Mr. Gennaco was responsible
for overseeing all hate crime, police abuse, and involuntary servitude
investigations and prosecutions in the district. He has investigated and
prosecuted many high profile cases, including the prosecution of Buford
Furrow, Jr. for his racially motivated killing of a postal carrier and antisemitic
shootings of four children and one adult at the North Valley Jewish
Community Center, the UC Irvine and Cal State Los Angeles cyberspace
hate mail prosecutions, and the Lancaster skinhead racial violence
prosecutions. An active member on numerous federal and local
civil rights task forces, Mr. Gennaco has also testified before the
Senate Judiciary Committee regarding hate crimes on the Internet.
Prior to working at the U.S. Attorney’s Office, Mr. Gennaco served for
ten years as a trial attorney with the Civil Rights Division in
Washington, D.C.
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KAREN IZZARD, is the Senior Policy Advisor at the Canadian
Human Rights Commission. She is a member of the bar of the
Province of Ontario. She has worked for the Commission for a
number of years, first as an investigator and now as a Policy/Legal
Advisor on the Commission’s Anti-Hate Team.
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JEREMY JONES is the Director of
Community and International Affairs of the
Australia/Israel and Jewish Affairs Council.
He is the Immediate Past President of the
Executive Council of Australian Jewry and
has served as the long-serving chair of
Faith Communities for (Aboriginal)
Reconciliation. He has participated in Australian government
delegations to a number of inter-governmental meetings, including
the United Nations’World Conference Against Racism, in Durban,
South Africa, the Stockholm International Forum on Prevention of
Genocide and the Asia-Pacific Regional Interfaith Dialogue in
Cebu, Philippines. He has researched, written on and lectured
extensively about antisemitism and racism and was the
Complainant in a number of precedent-setting racial hatred court
cases. In June 2005 he was made a Member of the Order of Australia for his work in interfaith dialogue and anti-racism. |
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PETER LEITNER is the President of the
Higgins Counterterrorism Research Center,
where he has helped to train over 7,500 law
enforcement, first responders, military, FBI,
and CIA personnel in areas that include intelligence
analysis and source development,
Islamist terrorism, and clandestine cell operations.
He is also the President of the Washington Center for Peace
and Justice, a non-profit organization providing assistance to victims
of terrorism and their families. He is program chairman of the
National Intelligence Conference, known as INTELCON, and a
member of the advisory boards for both the Maritime Security
Conference and Expo and the Global Border Security Conference. In
addition, Dr. Leitner is a Professor with the National Center for
Biodefense at George Mason University where he is responsible for
creating and teaching graduate classes on Nonproliferation in
Biodefense, History of Biological Agents and Counter-Terrorism and
Civil Rights. A prolific writer and author, Dr. Leitner has 30-years of
Federal service in a variety of national security positions including
20-years in the Department of Defense.
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BRIAN LEVIN, a criminologist and civil
rights attorney, is an associate professor of
criminal justice and Director of the Center
for the Study of Hate and Extremism at
California State University, San Bernardino,
where he specializes in analysis of hate
crime, terrorism and legal issues. Previously,
Prof. Levin served as Associate Director-Legal Affairs of the
Southern Poverty Law Center’s Klanwatch/Militia Task Force in
Montgomery, Alabama and Legal Director of the Center for the
Study of Ethnic and Racial Violence in Newport Beach, CA. He
was also a New York City Police Officer in the Harlem and
Washington Heights sections of Manhattan during the 1980s. He is
the author or co-author of books, scholarly articles, training manuals
and studies on extremism and hate crime. His book, the Limits of
Dissent is about the Constitution and domestic terrorism. Mr. Levin
is a court certified expert on extremism in the United States and
England and he has presented instruction and/or advised the Federal
Bureau of Investigation, US Department of Justice, Treasury Dept.,
U.S. Customs, American Bar Association, as well as several law
enforcement agencies and human rights organizations. |
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MICHAEL R. NELSON is the Director of
Internet Technology and Strategy at IBM, where
he manages a team helping define and implement
IBM's Next Generation Internet strategy. His
group is working with university researchers on
NGi technology, and communicating IBM's
vision of NGi, the Grid, and on demand computing
to customers, policy makers, the press, and the general public. Mr.
Nelson chaired the Internet Society's annual INET2002 meeting and in
2003 was selected as the Society's Vice President for Public Policy. In that
role, he attended the UN's World Summit on the Information Society in
Geneva in 2003 and has been very involved in preparations for the second
phase of WSIS in Tunis in November. Mr. Nelson also serves on the
Industry Strategy Council of the Internet2 research consortium and just
completed a two-year term as Chairman of the Board of Directors for the
Telecommunications Policy Research Conference. Prior to his joining
IBM, Mr. Nelson was a Special Assistant for Information Technology at
the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy where he
worked with Vice President Al Gore and the President's Science Advisor
on issues relating to the Global Information Infrastructure.
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RICHARD OWENS is a partner with Blake, Cassels & Graydon, LLP. He is the former Director of the Centre for Innovation, Law and Policy at the University of Toronto. Prof. Owens built his career in the Toronto office of
another major Canadian law firm, practising corporate and commercial law and specializing in technology-related law and the regulation of financial services. He has acted on behalf of many technology companies, as well as financial institutions, in their uses of technology, including licensing, strategic
alliances and joint ventures, privacy, financing, outsourcing, electronic
commerce, public-private partnerships and Internet issues. He is a director and program chair of the International Technology Law Association, and sits on the boards of other private corporations and not-for-profit corporations. He is the chair of the board of the University of Toronto Innovations Foundation and a member of the Advisory Committee to the Privacy Commissioner, Canada. He has been repeatedly recognized as one of Canada’s leading technology lawyers. |
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MARK A. POTOK is director of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Project and Editor of its award-winning Intelligence Report magazine. Mr. Potok leads one of the most highly regarded operations
monitoring the extreme right in the world today. In addition to editing the investigative magazine, Mr. Potok acts as a key spokesman for SPLC, a
well-known civil rights organization based in Alabama, and has testified
before the Senate, the United Nations High Commission on Human Rights and in other national and international venues. Before coming to SPLC in 1997, he spent 20 years as an award-winning reporter at newspapers including USA Today, the Dallas Times Herald and The Miami Herald. While at USA Today, he covered the 1993 siege in Waco, the rise of militias, the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing and the trial of Timothy McVeigh. In his current position, he is regularly quoted by major media, scholars and book authors in both the United States and abroad. |
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IAN WILMS is currently a Services Partner Manager with IBM Canada based in Calgary, Alberta. He has been with IBM for twelve years, serving in diverse capacities, including as the Latin America Services Procurement
Manager based in Mexico City. Prior to joining IBM, Mr. Wilms worked in Ottawa as a Special Assistant to the Minister of External Affairs, Barbara
McDougall, where he handled the Security and Intelligence portfolio.
Mr. Wilms was also a Lieutenant in the Canadian Naval Reserve with ten years of Service. In 2003 he was asked by the Mayor of Calgary to Chair the International Trade and Technology Summit in Calgary, an annual summit between Canada, the United States, and Mexico. Also in that year he was appointed Calgary Police Commissioner. In 2006 he was elected President of the Canadian Association of Police Boards, CAPB, the Governing body for municipal policing in Canada. Mr. Wilms was a recent recipient of the
Junior Achievers Leadership award for his work on raising Cyber Crime awareness. |
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CHRISTOPHER WOLF is a partner in the Washington, DC office of the New Yorkbased law firm, Proskauer Rose LLP, where he chairs that firm’s Internet Law practice. MSNBC has called Mr. Wolf a “pioneer in
Internet law” reflecting his involvement in precedent-setting Internet-related cases involving copyright, domain names, free speech, privacy and jurisdictional legal issues. For more than a decade, he has devoted substantial
time and energy to the issue of hate on the Internet through his involvement with the Anti-Defamation League and in his capacity as Chair of the ADL’s Internet Task Force and Technology Committee. He has written extensively on Hate on the Internet, including a law review article about extra-territorial jurisdiction over prohibited speech, which won him the 2005 Burton Award for Legal Writing. Mr. Wolf was a speaker at the First Stockholm conference on the Holocaust, where he focused on responses to Internet hate and was a panelist at a program on Internet hate in Jerusalem organized by the Knesset. He is the Editor and Lead Author of the upcoming treatise by the Practising Law Institute (PLI) entitled “Proskauer on Privacy”, which includes material on the tension between privacy and unmasking online wrongdoers. |
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