Nathalie Maréchal

Dr. Nathalie Maréchal is a writer, researcher and activist working at the intersection of internet policy and human rights advocacy, committed to fighting for democracy in the age of technofascism. She currently works as Managing Policy Director of the Institute for Information, the Internet and Democracy (IIID) at Northeastern University. She also sits on the Board of the Coalition for Independent Technology Research and the Advisory Council for the Canadian digital rights group Open Media, is a regular contributor to Tech Policy Press, and is a Technology and Human Rights Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Carr-Ryan Center for Human Rights for the 2026-2027 academic year.

 

Before joining IIID in January 2026, she was Co-Director of the Privacy & Data Project at the Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT), the leading nonpartisan, nonprofit organization fighting to advance civil rights and civil liberties in the digital age. She was previously the Policy Director at Ranking Digital Rights (RDR), an independent research program (then part of the policy think tank New America) that promotes freedom of expression and privacy on the internet by creating global standards and incentives for companies to respect and protect users’ rights.

 

Prior to RDR, Nathalie's scholarship focused on the convergence of classical authoritarianism and surveillance capitalism, giving rise to networked authoritarianism, a political system that leverages ICTs and media regulation to carefully control the expression of dissent in a way that gives the impression of limited freedom of expression without allowing dissent to gain traction, with grave implications for democracy and human rights.

 

In 2018, Nathalie received her PhD in Communication from the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. Her dissertation, “‘Use Signal, Use Tor’ ? : The Political Economy of Digital Rights Technology,” examined the relationship between the transnational social movement for human rights online and the US Internet Freedom Agenda through an ethnography of the “freedom technologists” behind popular secure messaging applications (Signal, WhatsApp, Telegram) and censorship circumvention software (Tor, Psiphon).

 

Fluent in French and Spanish, Nathalie has been a frequent speaker at digital rights events and academic conferences around the world. Her work has been published by Tech Policy Press, The Boston Globe, the International Journal of Communication, the Journal of Democracy, the Global Commission on Internet Governance, Global Voices, Motherboard, and other publications. Nathalie lives in Washington, DC with her family, and is active in the Free DC movement.

 

Fellowship Project: Surveillance capitalism is among the root causes of the hollowing-out of U.S. democracy and a key contributor to the country’s rapid authoritarian consolidation since 2025. Silicon Valley’s complicity in the MAGA autogolpe is both material—providing tools for surveillance, repression and information controls—and ideological, rooted in commitment both to the extractive logic of surveillance capitalism and to a quasi-religious belief in artificial general intelligence (AGI) and an imagined post-human future. It is now time to move from analysis to persuasion, and to lay the groundwork for action. In anticipation of the 120th Congress, “Dismantling surveillance capitalism, reconstructing democracy” is a two-part project to first, craft a narrative framework to persuade those who oppose authoritarianism that reconstructing American democracy requires dismantling surveillance capitalism and taming the tech industry; and second, argue for concrete policy interventions to do so.