Bio
Brett Max Kaufman is a senior staff attorney in the ACLU’s Center for Democracy working on a variety of issues related to national security, technology, surveillance, privacy, and First Amendment rights. He has litigated cases including ACLU v. Clapper, a challenge the NSA’s mass call-tracking program, Doe v. Mattis, a habeas challenge to the government’s military detention of a U.S. citizen in Iraq, and Leaders of a Beautiful Struggle v. Baltimore Police Department, a challenge to Baltimore’s mass aerial surveillance program. He joined the ACLU as a legal fellow from 2012 to 2014, then spent one year as a teaching fellow in the Technology Law & Policy Clinic at New York University School of Law, where he continued to serve as an adjunct professor of law from 2015 to 2022. He returned to the ACLU as a staff attorney in 2015. He is also an adjunct lecturer in law at UCLA School of Law.
Brett is a graduate of Stanford University and the University of Texas School of Law, where he was book review editor of the Texas Law Review and a human rights scholar at the Rapoport Center for Human Rights and Justice. After law school, he spent a year in Israel, serving as a foreign law clerk to Supreme Court Justice Asher Dan Grunis and as a volunteer attorney at Gisha Legal Center for Freedom of Movement. He then clerked for the Hon. Robert D. Sack of the Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, and for Judge Richard J. Holwell and (after Judge Holwell’s resignation) Judge Lewis A. Kaplan of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.
Featured work
Jul 1, 2016
FBI Cameras in Seattle Need to Be Regulated by the Public — Not Secretly Imposed on the Public
Apr 4, 2016
Bye-Bye Birdie: Reddit’s Warrant Canary Disappears
Feb 26, 2016
Court Considers Releasing Key Documents Governing Secretive Targeted Killing Program
Nov 24, 2015
Federal Court Preserves Secrecy Over Targeted Killing Memos
Oct 15, 2015
The Intercept’s Drone Papers Shed New Light on Targeted Killing
Jun 20, 2015
The CIA Can’t Keep Its Drone Propaganda Straight
Jul 11, 2014
New Court Orders Signal More Drone Documents Are on the Way