Jon Penney

Jon is a lawyer, Research Fellow at the Citizen Lab / Canada Centre for Global Security Studies, Munk School of Global Affairs, University of Toronto, and a doctoral student in information communication sciences at the Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford, where his interdisciplinary research explores regulatory chilling effects online.

In 2011, he was a Google Policy Fellow at the Citizen Lab, where he helped lead the OpenNet Initiative's new Transparency Project, a public/private research collaboration founded to encourage corporate transparency about government and law enforcement data requests. He was also Project Coordinator for the Privacy Value Networks Project, a large scale, multi-university, multi-million dollar Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (UK) funded project on data privacy, led by the Oxford Internet Institute.

A native Nova Scotian and graduate of Dalhousie University, he previously studied at Columbia Law School as a Fulbright Scholar and at Oxford as a Mackenzie King Scholar, where he also Associate Editor of the Oxford University Commonwealth Law Journal. He previously taught law as a Senior Research Fellow and Lecturer at Victoria University in Wellington, New Zealand, and, before all that, worked as a federal lawyer and, from time to time, as a policy advisor at the federal level.

His research, broadly speaking, concerns constitutional/human rights law, intellectual property, and digital media policy, particularly where these areas intersect with censorship, privacy, and security.