Drew Concannon is an Intelligence and Data Privacy Law Fellow at the Strauss Center, where he also serves as Senior Privacy Counsel to the Center’s Applied Cybersecurity Community Clinic.  Drew is an attorney and former intelligence officer with experience in the Intelligence Community and U.S. Army.  In the private sector, Drew has practiced privacy and technology law at an international law firm and at a publicly traded technology company.

In government, Drew served as a Deputy Chief of the Office of Civil Liberties, Privacy, and Transparency within the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), where he worked across ODNI to ensure that civil liberties and privacy considerations were appropriately incorporated in counterterrorism, counterintelligence, and counter-proliferation programs. He also served as the Civil Liberties and Privacy Officer for the National Counterterrorism Center. There, he provided privacy and civil liberties advice on international and domestic terrorism matters and counseled senior intelligence leaders on a broad spectrum of intelligence challenges. In these roles, Drew worked across the Intelligence Community to lead civil liberties and privacy efforts related to emerging technologies, including artificial intelligence and machine learning, and on issues related to publicly available information, open source intelligence, and social media.

In the private sector, Drew has served as a lead counsel at Meta, where he covered legal issues at the intersection of law, privacy, and technology, and as an attorney with Alston & Bird LLP in Washington, DC. Before practicing law, he was a management consultant with Booz Allen Hamilton, where he provided advice and support to agencies in the Intelligence Community.

Drew began his career as a United States Army intelligence officer with a variety of command and staff assignments in the United States and Iraq. During OPERATION IRAQI FREEDOM 06-08, he led a joint team of intelligence and targeting officers focused on countering improvised explosive devices and disrupting insurgent networks during the Surge.

Drew received his J.D. cum laude from American University Washington College of Law and his B.S. from the United States Military Academy where he was on the Dean’s List. Drew is admitted to practice law in Virginia and the District of Columbia. He is a Certified Information Privacy Professional/United States (CIPP/US), Certified Information Privacy Manager (CIPM), and Fellow of Information Privacy (FIP) with the International Association of Privacy Professionals. Drew was an adjunct professorial lecturer at American University Washington College of Law where he taught a course on information privacy and data security law. He was also a Seminar XXI Fellow with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a finalist for the ODNI Galileo Award, and a recipient of the ODNI Exceptional Service Award. He resides in Austin, Texas.