Defending Rights & Dissent Announces New Executive Director Shannon Al-Wakeel
October 5, 2026
U.S. Sanctions ICC, Undermining International Law & Obstructing Justice
October 9, 2026Newsletter: October 2026
Announcing New Executive Director Shannon Al-Wakeel!
On October 5, Defending Rights & Dissent announced veteran human rights attorney and former board co-president Shannon Al-Wakeel as our new Executive Director. Al-Wakeel brings more than a decade of experience defending civil liberties and human rights, with particular expertise at the intersection of national security policy, free expression, and the protection of Muslim communities’ constitutional rights.
Following several years as an immigrants’ rights lawyer, Al-Wakeel was the founding Executive Director of Muslim Justice League, a Boston-based nonprofit established by Muslim women in 2014. Most recently, Al-Wakeel was executive director of the Levin Center for Public Service and Public Interest at Stanford Law School. Al-Wakeel has served on Defending Rights & Dissent’s board of directors since 2020, and was elected co-president in 2025.
Al-Wakeel succeeds longtime Executive Director Sue Udry, who will retire in November 2026 after nearly two decades leading the organization. Udry has led DRAD since 2007, building on a career spanning four decades of advocacy for peace, civil rights, civil liberties, and economic justice. During her tenure, she guided the organization through the 2015 merger of the Defending Dissent Foundation and the Bill of Rights Defense Committee, bringing together two trailblazing civil liberties organizations and laying the foundation for Defending Rights & Dissent as it exists today.
Read our announcement of Shannon Al-Wakeel as our new Executive Director, including statements from Al-Wakeel, Udry, and Board co-president Sascha Meinrath.
DRAD Issues Major New Report on FBI Spying on Political Speech
On Sept 25, Defending Rights & Dissent published Can the FBI Spy on the First Amendment? and delivered the report to every Congressional office. The report exposes how the FBI has quietly put together internal rules for itself that, along with a series of court rulings and executive branch legal opinions, blatantly permit spying on political speech. The report is released on the first anniversary of Trump’s National Security Presidential Memo-7 (NSPM-7), which serves as the administration’s blueprint to crush domestic political opponents on the left.
The report calls on Congress to enact a series of reforms, including creating a statutory charter limiting the FBI’s investigative authorities, strengthening protections for political speech and organizing, and requiring a warrant for foreign intelligence searches.
Defending Rights & Dissent is urging members of Congress to schedule a briefing with us to discuss the FBI’s investigative and surveillance powers, and how we can rein in this threat to the First Amendment.
Days before the report was released, DRAD Policy Director Chip Gibbons joined the Left Reckoning podcast to discuss the Trump administration’s crackdown on dissent and its echoes of past McCarthyite repression. Gibbons broke down NSPM-7 and explained how the administration’s war on ‘antifa’ makes use of the existing counterterrorism apparatus–including the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Forces–to weaponize the federal government to investigate and spy on Trump’s adversaries.
DRAD at Integrity Media’s Journalism Awards Ceremony
Defending Rights & Dissent staff members Sue Udry, Chip Gibbons, and Nathan Fuller attended Integrity Media Foundation’s second annual Independent Journalism Awards ceremony in Chicago last month. The event brought together journalists, advocates, lawyers, and whistleblowers, to honor independent media and the courageous sources who speak truth to power and keep the public informed.
This year’s ceremony honored retired Judge Andrew Napolitano, investigative journalist Glenn Greenwald, Bad Faith podcast host Briahna Joy Gray, The Grayzone editor Max Blumenthal, and Chicago writer Jamie Kalven.
Before the awards ceremony, Greenwald hosted a panel discussion with CIA whistleblower John Kiriakou and American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee President and attorney Jenin Younes, on the courage of whistleblowers to risk their lives in coming forward with evidence of crimes and abuse, and the need to reform the Espionage Act to allow these sources to defend themselves in court.
Defending Rights & Dissent continues to fight for major Espionage Act reform, urging Congress to pass the Daniel Ellsberg Press Freedom and Whistleblower Protection Act, introduced by Rep. Rashida Tlaib earlier this year.
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- Chip Gibbons & Nathan Fuller at Integrity Media’s awards ceremony (Photo via Integrity Media)
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- Sue Udry at the Integrity Media Awards whistleblower panel (Photo via Integrity Media)
25 Years After 9/11: End the War on Terror at Home
Marking a quarter century since the 9/11 attacks, Defending Rights & Dissent renewed our call to end the War on Terror here at home.
While the U.S. went to war in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Bush administration exploited the tragedy to ram through their authoritarian agenda domestically. They passed the Patriot Act, enabling a massive expansion of national security surveillance, and they weakened protections for American’s rights to privacy and free expression.
Twenty five years later, this cynical power grab by the national security state remains very much with us. It’s five years since the last U.S. troops left Afghanistan, yet 15 men remain at Guantánamo Bay. And the new surveillance powers, not only remain on the books, but are ever expanding. In fact, it is much of counterterrorism, strengthened and expanded by the War on Terror, that Trump and Miller are using to wage war on their domestic enemies.
The very last U.S. troops withdrew from Iraq just this month, finally officially ending the occupation and war that began in 2003. The war on terror continues at home, however, as President Trump has weaponized the counterterrorism apparatus to launch a massive attack on dissent and political activism across the United States.
Twenty five years after 9/11, read our renewed push to End the War on Terror at Home.
