The Organizers

Cassandra Deskus: Challenge Co-Lead

Cassandra (Cassie) Deskus is a JD ('18) student interested in criminal justice and technology law. She participated in NYU’s Technology Law and Policy Clinic. She was a student advocate for the Domestic Violence Advocacy Project, where she worked on the Uncontested Divorce Project. She spent her 1L at the Department of Justice’s Computer Crime & Intellectual Property Section and will spend her 2L summer at the U.S. Department of Justice’s Child Exploitation & Obscenity Section. She is a managing editor of the Journal of Legislation and Public Policy. Prior to law school, Cassie worked for three years as a software engineer and analyst. She has B.S. in Math from the University of Chicago and an M.S. from Northwestern University.

Joshua R. Fattal: Challenge Co-Lead

Joshua R. Fattal is a rising 3L student at NYU School of Law. He currently serves as Co-Chair of the IPELS Cyber Law Committee, and is also a student advocate for the International Refugee Assistance Project. He spent this past summer in the Cybersecurity Practice of the NYC office of Steptoe and Johnson LLP, where he worked on issues concerning data breaches and foreign laws on encryption technologies, and has served as a research assistant for Professor Samuel Rascoff at NYU Law, Matthew Waxman at Columbia Law, and Fareed Zakaria at CNN. He previously studied History at Columbia University, where he graduated Phi Beta Kappa and Magna Cum Laude.

Leonid Grinberg: Challenge Co-Lead

Leonid Grinberg is a 3L student interested in how rapid technological developments interact with legal and regulatory frameworks. He spent summer 2017 at the Enforcement Division of the Securities and Exchange Commission, and fall of 2016 at the United States Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of New York. He is the Editor-in-Chief of the Annual Survey of American Law and served on the board of the Supreme Court Forum. Last summer, he worked in the Fraud Section of the Criminal Division in the Department of Justice. Prior to attending law school, he worked as a software engineer at the New York Times. He graduated with an S.B. in Computer Science and Engineering from MIT.

Emily Poole: Challenge co-Lead

Emily Poole is a rising 3L student interested in cybersecurity law, its implications for our national security, and the role of our democratic institutions in overseeing developments in both of these areas. She is the President of the National Security Reading Group, a student organization that hosts monthly lunch discussions with experts in different areas of national security law. She is also on the board of the NYU Law and Government Society. In Summer 2016, she was a judicial intern at the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, and also conducted research on privacy law for an upcoming book by a NYU professor. In Summer 2017, she will be working on cybersecurity issues as a summer associate at Alston & Bird LLP in Washington, D.C. She graduated summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa from Tufts University with a B.A. in International Relations and French.

Kevin Kirby: Mentor

Kevin Kirby, the mentor for the 2017 NYU CSAW Policy Competition, is a 3L (JD 2017) student at NYU School of Law and recipient of the NYU Law School’s Center on Law and Security ASPIRE Scholarship. Before attending law school, Kirby spent five years as a combat engineer officer in the Army, followed by project management at Starbucks, where he developed requirements for a facilities management software upgrade. Since moving from Seattle to attend NYU, Kirby has done research into products liability and voter privacy issues for NYU Law professors and interned for the Honorable Judge Amit Mehta of the U.S. District Court in D.C.

Kirby worked previously at the Federal Trade Commission in the Bureau of Consumer Protection, which is involved in prosecuting companies with unfair or deceptive data security practices. His interest in the question of what constitutes reasonable security factored into this year’s prompt for the Policy Competition, which asks competitors for policy proposals that would ensure that the true costs of data insecurity are allocated appropriately. When Kirby isn’t researching how much money companies should spend on cybersecurity, you can find him playing chess in Washington Square Park.

Zachary Goldman: Faculty Guide

Zachary K. Goldman is the Executive Director of the Center on Law and Security and an Adjunct Professor of Law at NYU School of Law. Previously, Goldman served as a Special Assistant to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the U.S. Department of Defense, and as a policy advisor in the U.S. Department of the Treasury’s Office of Terrorism and Financial Intelligence, where he was the subject matter expert on terrorist financing in the Arabian Peninsula and Iran sanctions. In the private sector, he was a litigator at Sullivan & Cromwell LLP in New York. Read more....