Alex Abdo is the inaugural litigation director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University. He has been involved in the conception and litigation of most of the Institute’s legal challenges.

His work has focused most recently on challenges to the use of spyware to intimidate journalists, the secrecy of the Office of Legal Counsel’s legal opinions, the digitization of mail in jails and prisons, and the legal threats issued by social media platforms to researchers hoping to illuminate the influence that the platforms are having on society. He was also involved in the Institute’s prior challenges to the government’s system of “prepublication review,” which requires millions of former employees of the intelligence agencies to submit their manuscripts to government censors prior to publication; the Institute’s groundbreaking challenge to the constitutionality of President Trump’s blocking of critics from his @realDonaldTrump Twitter account; and the Institute’s and the ACLU’s challenge to the constitutionality of the NSA’s program of “upstream surveillance,” under which the agency scans the content of U.S. persons’ international communications as they transit the internet backbone inside the United States.

Prior to joining the Institute, Abdo worked for eight years at the ACLU, where he was at the forefront of litigation relating to NSA surveillance, encryption, anonymous speech online, government transparency, and the post-9/11 abuse of detainees in U.S. custody. In 2015, he argued the appeal that resulted in the Second Circuit’s invalidation of the NSA’s call-records program.

Abdo graduated from Yale College and Harvard Law School. After law school, he clerked for the Honorable Barbara M.G. Lynn, U.S. District Judge for the Northern District of Texas, and for the Honorable Rosemary Barkett, U.S. Circuit Judge for the Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit.