IN THE FILM

Shamshad Ahmad is a naturalized U.S. citizen born in India,  Ahmad teaches physics at the State University of New York at Albany.  He is the president of Albany's Masjid as-Salam mosque, where Yassin Aref was Imam and Mohammed Hossain was a member until their arrest in 2004.   Ahmad has been a leader in the effort to raise public awareness about what he sees as the injustice of the Aref-Hossain case.

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Barbara Bailey, Peter Chase, George Christian and Janet Nocek are the 4 board members of the Connecticut computer services provider Library Connection who sued the Attorney General of the United States over the FBI’s use of National Security Letters.  Since 2006, when their names became public, they have received awards from library and intellectual freedom groups.

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James Bamford is the author of two detailed histories of the National Security Agency: Body of Secrets (2002) and The Puzzle Palace (1982).  He was one of the plaintiffs in the ACLU’s lawsuit that challenged the legality of President Bush’s warrantless wiretapping program. More about Bamford and his work

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Ann Beeson, the Associate Legal Director of the ACLU, represented the board members of Library Connection in their court fight against National Security Letters, and was the lead attorney in the ACLU's lawsuit against the NSA's warrantless wiretapping program.  She was recently named by the National Law Journal as one of America’s top 50 women litigators. 
More about Beeson and her work

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Valerie Caproni, who was appointed General Counsel of the FBI by Director Robert Mueller in 2003, grew up in Columbus, Georgia.  During the 1980s and 90s she was an Assistant U.S. Attorney in Brooklyn, New York, where she prosecuted mobsters and drug dealers.  In 1996, she helped lead the investigation of the crash of TWA Flight 800.  She has also served as a senior attorney in the Securities and Exchange Commission.  Ms. Caproni has appeared at public forums examining issues of security and liberty.  More about Caproni and her work

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William Chase, who ran the FBI’s Albany division during the final months of its investigation of Yassin Aref and Mohammed Hossain, is now the Special Agent In Charge of the FBI’s Baltimore office.  A Massachusetts native, he previously served as Assistant Special Agent in Charge of the FBI’s Boston office. More about Chase and his work

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David Cole, Professor at Georgetown University Law Center in Washington, D.C., is the legal affairs correspondent for The Nation magazine.  He is the co-author, with James X. Dempsey, of Terrorism and the Constitution: Sacrificing Civil Liberties for National Security; and the author of Enemy Aliens: Double Standards and Constitutional Freedoms in the War on Terrorism.  More about Cole and his work

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Karen Greenberg is the Executive Director of the Center on Law and Security at NYU Law School.  The Center has compiled reports on the Justice Department’s record of counterterrorist prosecutions since 9/11, and about the warrantless wiretapping program of the NSA.   More about Greenberg and her work

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Terence Kindlon, who defended Yassin Aref in the Albany case, is a Marine Corps veteran of the Vietnam War.  He was awarded a Purple Heart after suffering a head wound so severe it was thought he would never walk again.  Kindlon recently ran a marathon in celebration of his 60th birthday. He is working on an appeal of Aref’s conviction.  More about Kindlon and his work

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Mark Klein is the retired AT&T technician who alleges that in San Francisco, AT&T constructed a secret room to which huge streams of Internet traffic were electronically diverted, in order, Klein believes, to enable the signals to be searched through by the NSA.

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Kevin Luibrand, the attorney who defended Mohammed Hossain in the Albany case, is an Army veteran who served in Operation Desert Storm. He is working on an appeal of Hossain’s conviction.

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Paul McNulty, the Deputy Attorney General of the United States, served previously as United States Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia.  In that job he won convictions in some of the nation’s best known terrorism cases, including those of Zaccarias Mossaoui, Iyman Faris, and the so-called Virginia jihad cell.  More about McNulty and his work

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Kevin O’Connor is the United States Attorney for the District of Connecticut.  He represented the U.S. Government in its battle with the Connecticut librarians over National Security Letters.  More about O’Connor and his work

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Athan Theoharis, Emeritus Professor of History at Marquette University in Milwaukee.  Specializing in the history of 20th century government surveillance, Theoharis has devoted decades to examining the records of the FBI.  Theoharis is the author of The FBI and American Democracy: A Brief Critical History (2004); Chasing Spies (2002); From The Secret Files of J. Edgar Hoover (1991); and The Boss: J. Edgar Hoover and the Great American Inquisition (with co-author John Cox, 1988). 

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John Yoo, who served as a Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the Justice Department from 2001 to 2003, is a Professor at the School of Law – Boalt Hall at the University of California at Berkeley.  Yoo has been a lightning rod for controversy over his authorship of a Justice Department memo providing legal justification for the coercive interrogation of captured terrorist suspects. He is the author of War By Other Means (2006). More about Yoo and his work

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