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
Nov 27, 2013
Echoing Dirty Past, NSA Sought to Reveal Porn Habits to Discredit Targets
Nov 21, 2013
Finally, a Day in Court to Challenge Mass Surveillance
Nov 20, 2013
How a Secret Court's Backwards Logic Opened the Floodgates for NSA Spying
Nov 19, 2013
Senators Say Bulk Collection Unnecessary to Fight Terrorism
Nov 6, 2013
ACLU and Yale Clinic Seek Secret Court Opinions Authorizing NSA’s Bulk Collection of Americans’ Records
Oct 1, 2013
In Court Today: Challenging the CIA's Targeted-Killing "Secrets"
Sep 16, 2013
ACLU Challenges Government’s "Fiction of Deniability" on Use of Drones for Targeted Killing
Aug 9, 2013
A Guide to What We Now Know About the NSA's Dragnet Searches of Your Communications
Aug 1, 2013
How to Decode the True Meaning of What NSA Officials Say
Jun 19, 2013
Under the FISA Amendments Act, Your Calls and Emails Can’t Be "Targeted," But They Can Certainly Be Collected