Ben Wizner

Following the April 2019 arrest of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange in London's Ecuadorian Embassy, Ben Wizner said that if authorities were to prosecute Assange "for violating U.S. secrecy laws [it] would set an especially dangerous precedent for U.S. journalists, who routinely violate foreign secrecy laws to deliver information vital to the public's interest."

In 2013, Edward Snowden contacted journalist Glenn Greenwald and filmmaker Laura Poitras, longtime acquaintances of Wizner, about releasing classified information on NSA programs. Poitras consulted with Wizner before travelling to meet Snowden in Hong Kong. Greenwald later put Wizner into contact with Snowden in July 2013, when Snowden was stranded in the transit zone in Moscow, his passport having been revoked by the U.S. Government. Wizner and Snowden exchanged encrypted communications during this time.

In 2011, Wizner became director of the ACLU's Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project.

Starting in 2005, Wizner represented Khalid El-Masri, a German citizen arrested while travelling in Macedonia on suspicion of links to Al Qaeda, who was held by the CIA at a black site in Afghanistan for five months, despite evidence that he was the wrong person. El-Masri's suit was dismissed in the U.S. on grounds of state secrecy, though the CIA ultimately admitted to making a mistake, in a report released by the U.S. Senate. The European Court of Human Rights ruled against Macedonia in the case.

Wizner began working for the American Civil Liberties Union in Los Angeles in August 2001, initially focusing on prison reform. Following the September 11 attacks, Wizner's focus shifted to civil liberties issues relating to U.S. national security. Around 2004, he moved to the ACLU's headquarters in New York City. There, he argued legal cases relating to airport security, government watchlists, surveillance practices, targeted killing, extraordinary rendition, and torture. He made several trips to the Guantanamo Bay detention camp. Many of the cases Wizner took were dismissed; he later commented that "on the worst days, I believed that what we were doing ... wasn't litigation in the traditional sense. It wasn't trying to get a court to do something, it was creating a record so that ... people would be able to look back and decide whether it had been the right decision or a disastrous decision."

Ben Wizner (born 1971) is an American lawyer, writer, and civil liberties advocate with the American Civil Liberties Union. Since July 2013, he has been the lead attorney of NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.

Wizner was born in 1971 in New Haven, Connecticut, and grew up on the campus of Yale University, where his father, Stephen Wizner, is a professor of law at Yale Law School and his mother is a dean. He has described being drawn to social justice work from at least as early as high school; after graduating Harvard College in 1993, he worked for an organization that provided legal assistance to homeless and near-homeless people. At New York University School of Law, he planned to work in legal services for impoverished communities, and on capital punishment cases. After graduating, he clerked for judge Stephen Reinhardt of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.