CINDY COHN, CORY DOCTOROW, RICHARD THIEME, JARON LANIER TO KEYNOTE HOPE 2020

Preparations for HOPE 2020 are continuing. As announced, HOPE 2020 is being transformed into an entirely virtual experience and we want to make that as amazing as we possibly can. We're still accepting applications for speakers and workshops. Full details are at www.hope.net.

We've tripled the length of the event to span *nine* days (July 25th to August 2nd, 2020) and we will have a different keynote for each of them.

Here are the first four keynotes:

Cindy Cohn is an American civil liberties attorney specializing in Internet law. After serving for 15 years as Legal Director and General Counsel for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, she became its Executive Director in 2015. In 2006, Cohn was named one of the 100 most influential lawyers in America by the National Law Journal. In November 2018, she was featured among Americas Top 50 Women In Tech by Forbes. Cohn also serves on the Board of Directors of the Tor Project, Inc.

Cory Doctorow is a Canadian-British blogger, journalist, and science fiction author who served as co-editor of the blog Boing Boing. He is an activist in favor of liberalizing copyright laws and a proponent of the Creative Commons organization, using some of their licenses for his books. Some common themes of his work include digital rights management, file sharing, and post-scarcity economics. His most recent novel is Walkaway (2017) and his most recent collection of novellas is Radicalized (2019).

Richard Thieme is a former priest who became a commentator on technology and culture, founding the consulting firm ThiemeWorks. He is the author of the syndicated column Islands in the Clickstream, which was published in 60 countries and in 2004 was turned into a book of the same name. In 2010 he published a book of short stories (Mind Games) and in 2012 he contributed to the peer-reviewed academic work, UFOs and Government, a Historical Inquiry. Regarded as a member of the cyber avant-garde, Thieme has spoken at various conferences since the mid-1990s, focusing on the impact of new technologies on individuals and organizational structures, with an emphasis on security and intelligence, and he has become somewhat of a father figure to many in the hacker subculture.

Jaron Lanier is an American computer philosophy writer, computer scientist, visual artist, and composer of classical music. Considered a founding father of the field of virtual reality, Lanier left Atari in 1985 to co-found VPL Research, Inc., the first company to sell VR goggles and gloves. In the late 1990s, Lanier worked on applications for Internet2, and in the 2000s, he was a visiting scholar at Silicon Graphics and various universities. In 2006 he began to work at Microsoft, and from 2009 has worked at Microsoft Research as an Interdisciplinary Scientist. His most recent book is Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now.