Nym Technologies Onboards Renowned Attorney Ahmed Ghappour as General Counsel

Nym has announced on March 22, 2022, that Ahmed Ghappour, a law professor and cybersecurity expert is now its General Counsel. Nym aims to leverage Ghappour’s human rights and cybersecurity expertise to strengthen its privacy-first infrastructure.

Nym Onboards Ahmed Ghappour

Nym Technologies, an open-source, permissionless, incentivized and decentralized network that claims to be focused on preventing metadata surveillance at the network layer, as well as preventing the linking and monitoring of usage at the application layers (anonymous credentials), has hired Ahmed Ghappour to function as its General Counsel.

Based in Neuchatel, Switzerland, Nym claims to protect users even against the most powerful, passive adversaries that can observe every data going in and out of their internet connection. With Nym, everyone can use the Internet without the fear of being watched.

Ghappour first met Nym’s Harry Halpin and Claudia Diaz back in 2014 at the Computers, Privacy, and Data Protection conference in Brussels.

“We stayed up all night discussing machine intelligence, cyber warfare, mass surveillance, and some of the very problems he Nym Network seeks to solve,” said Nym CEO Harry Halpin.

“As a trained computer engineer with experience handling cases as serious as human rights abuses at Guantanamo  and a deep understanding of surveillance and cross-jurisdictional matters, Ahmed is a perfect fit for Nym,” he added.

Ghappour, the latest member of the Nym Technologies team, is a professor at Boston University School of Law, where his teaching and scholarship focus is at the intersection of privacy, security, and technology. 

In April 2017, he published a seminal paper in the Stanford Law Review analyzing the legal implications of cross-border hacking and anonymous networks like the dark web and frequently speaks and comments on surveillance, privacy, and security matters.

A Perfect Fit

Nym Technologies protects privacy at the network layer by encrypting and relaying users’ internet traffic through a multi-layered network called a mixnet. The mixnet nodes constantly mix the internet traffic of Nym users with that of other people, thereby making communications and metadata (IP address, who you talk to, when and where, and more) private.  

The Nym team strongly believes that the addition of Ghappour, with a background of working in human rights and expertise in cybersecurity, further strengthens Nym’s primary objective of offering global ‘cybersecurity from below’ by protecting people’s privacy at the network layer.

Before embarking on his hugely successful academic journey, Ghappour functioned as a human rights advocate in Egypt during the Arab Spring, and also worked as a staff attorney at Reprieve UK, where he represented over 40 Guantanamo prisoners. He started his legal career as a patent litigator, leveraging the technical skills developed as a computer engineer at Silicon Graphics, Inc., and Sun Microsystems.

Ghappour built law clinics at the University of Texas and the University of California to provide litigation support in national security and cybersecurity cases. The British-American criminal law expert has represented numerous digital causes celebres, including Chelsea Manning, and others.

Ghappour litigated the first criminal case to challenge bulk metadata collection by the NSA under Section 215 of the Patriot Act, a secret surveillance program made infamous by Edward Snowden’s first public disclosure in 2014.

On joining Nym Ghappour said:

“As our digital systems become more entangled with our lives, ordinary people need and deserve strong privacy protections. We finally have the technological solutions to end surveillance capitalism-decentralized applications with the right incentives. I’m looking forward to working with the Nym team and helping them realize their vision.”