Recon on Trial: The OSINT Operator's Legal Playbook
Recon Village @ DEF CON 34 • August 6-9, 2026
Abstract
You scrape a public site. You enumerate subdomains. You grep GitHub for secrets. You curl a misconfigured API. Each one touches a statute. Some have been to the Supreme Court. Most operators don't know which is which — until the preservation letter arrives. A federal-court-qualified expert witness (U.S. v. Sullivan) walks through five live OSINT techniques with real-time legal annotation. Zero lawyer-speak. GitHub release included.
Speaker
JAMS Neutral | Founder, Law & Forensics | Faculty Harvard
Daniel B. Garrie is the Founder and Managing Partner of Law & Forensics LLC, a specialized legal engineering firm focused on cybersecurity, digital forensics, and e-discovery. He is also a Neutral (arbitrator, mediator, and Special Master) with JAMS, and Adjunct Faculty at Harvard University, where he teaches courses on computer forensics, cybersecurity law, cryptocurrency, and blockchain. Daniel holds a J.D. from Rutgers School of Law and an M.A. in Computer Science (Honors) from Brandeis University. This dual fluency in law and technology has defined his career. He co-created the JAMS Artificial Intelligence Dispute Resolution Rules—the first arbitration framework purpose-built for AI conflicts—and holds four U.S. patents in cybersecurity forensic technology. He has served as a court-appointed expert and special master in hundreds of federal and state proceedings, including serving as Special Master for In Re: Facebook, Inc. Consumer Privacy User Profile Litigation. A prolific author and educator, Daniel has published over 400 legal and technical articles, co-authored books including Cyber Warfare: Understanding the Law, Policy and Technology and Understanding Software, the Internet, Mobile Computing, and the Cloud, and his scholarship has been recognized by Supreme Court Justices and cited in over 500 articles and judicial opinions. He has delivered 600+ keynotes and seminars to judges, executives, attorneys, and government officials worldwide, and is the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Law & Cyber Warfare. Prior to founding Law & Forensics, Daniel built and sold three technology startups. He currently advises AI safety and blockchain analytics companies including Reality Defender and AnChain.ai, and is a Ponemon Fellow at the Ponemon Institute for Information Privacy.
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