Jennifer Jones is a staff attorney at the Knight First Amendment Institute. Her work focuses on issues related to government transparency, government surveillance, and social media.

Jones leads the Knight Institute’s litigation in Knight Institute v. Department of State, a Freedom of Information Act suit seeking records related to foreign state efforts to influence how online platforms moderate user content. Jones is also a core member of the team litigating A.B.O. Comix v. San Mateo County, challenging San Mateo, California’s policy of digitizing and then destroying physical mail sent to people incarcerated in its jails. She currently leads the Institute’s efforts to secure the release of records related to public school districts’ use of spyware to enforce censorship policies restricting students and teachers from discussing race, gender, and sexual orientation in the classroom. Her other projects involve protections for independent researchers who study social media platforms, and ongoing research related to government efforts to manipulate or censor public discourse by “jawboning” private speech intermediaries.

Prior to joining the Institute, Jones was a legal fellow with the ACLU of Northern California’s Technology and Civil Liberties Project, where she worked on issues involving privacy, government surveillance, and public access to information. Her work included a challenge to police surveillance of racial justice activists in Williams v. San Francisco and a Freedom of Information Act suit, ACLU v. ICE, which sought records related to federal immigration enforcement agencies’ use of face surveillance systems.

Jones has been published in UCLA Law Review and UC Berkeley’s Othering & Belonging Institute Tech x Belonging series. She has been quoted in Reuters, The Guardian, NBC News, and WIRED, among other publications.

Jones holds a B.A. in Sociology from UCLA, an MSW with an emphasis in community organizing, planning, and administration from the University of Southern California, and a J.D. from the UCLA School of Law. During law school, she served as an editor of the UCLA Law Review and National Black Law Journal and received the UC Human Rights Fellowship for her work at the Center for Constitutional Rights. Prior to law school, she coordinated care for youth exiting the family regulation system and advocated for equitable local and state education policies in California.