Jameel Jaffer is a Canadian human rights and civil liberties attorney and the inaugural director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, which was created to defend the freedoms of speech and the press in the digital age.

"[2] Among the Knight Institute's first lawsuits was a successful constitutional challenge to President Trump's practice of blocking critics from his Twitter account.

[10] In 2004, Jaffer litigated a successful constitutional challenge to the USA Patriot Act, obtaining a federal court ruling that invalidated the "national security letter" provision.

[12] In 2006, Jaffer filed a case challenging the Bush administration's refusal to issue a visa to Tariq Ramadan, a well-known Islamic thinker.

[17] The case involved a constitutional challenge to a federal statute that gave the National Security Agency broad power to monitor international communications.

[20] Edward Snowden called the book "a much-needed corrective to the linguistic manipulation and official obfuscation that have made [the targeted-killing] policies possible.