John Morris

John B. Morris, Jr. is a nonresident senior fellow in Governance Studies with the Center for Technology Innovation at the Brookings Institution. Until May 2019, Morris served—under two presidential administrations—as a career member of the Senior Executive Service at the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) within the U.S. Department of Commerce. At NTIA, he led the Office of Policy Analysis & Development, which handles a broad range of internet and telecommunications policy issues, including privacy, cybersecurity, national security, surveillance and law enforcement issues, network neutrality, intellectual property, and emerging technology issues. Morris oversaw the implementation of the Obama administration’s Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights. He frequently represented the Department of Commerce and NTIA in White House and interagency meetings on national security, cybersecurity, privacy, and other topics.

Before joining NTIA in 2011, Morris was the General Counsel of the Center for Democracy & Technology, and the Director of CDT's Internet Standards, Technology and Policy Project. He led CDT's work on free expression issues, and worked actively on privacy, surveillance, cybersecurity, and net neutrality, among other issues. He was active in technical standards development efforts at the Internet Engineering Task Force and the World Wide Web Consortium, and is a co-author of seven IETF “RFC” standards documents focused on privacy.

Prior to joining CDT in 2001, Morris was a partner in the law firm of Jenner & Block, where he litigated groundbreaking cases in Internet and First Amendment law. He was a lead counsel in the ACLU v. Reno/American Library Association v. U.S. Department of Justice case, in which the Supreme Court unanimously extended to speech on the Internet the highest level of constitutional protection. In that case, Morris was responsible for the development of the factual presentation concerning how the Internet works, a presentation that served as the foundation for the Supreme Court's landmark decision.

Starting in the 1970s, Morris had extensive experience with technology, computers and politics. In 1985, he co-founded Intelligent Solutions, Inc., which developed the leading constituent services product used on Capitol Hill today (now under different ownership). Mr. Morris received his B.A. magna cum laude with distinction from Yale University and his J.D. from Yale Law School, where he was the managing editor of the Yale Law Journal. Following law school, he clerked for Judge Thomas A. Clark of the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals, worked for three years as a staff attorney at the Southern Center for Human Rights in Atlanta, Georgia, and then joined Jenner & Block in Washington in 1990. He lives with his wife in Maryland, and is the proud father of two sons currently pursuing the fields of astrophysics and mathematics.

EDUCATION

• Yale Law School, J.D.
• Yale University, B.A.