Our Team

Tony Wilson

Tony is the founder and Director of the Security Force Monitor. Prior to launching the Security Force Monitor as a project of the Columbia Law School Human Rights Institute, he worked as a grantmaker with the National Security and Human Rights Campaign at the Open Society Foundations. Previous to this he was an advocate on U.S. government policies towards the Middle East and multilateral engagements at the Open Society Foundations’ Washington Office. He also worked on national security issues at the Center for American Progress and the Ploughshares Fund. He received his Master’s in Security Studies with a concentration in U.S. National Security from Georgetown University and his Bachelor’s in Political Science and History at the University of California, Berkeley.

Tom Longley

Tom is the Deputy Director of Security Force Monitor. For nearly 20 years, he has been  a human rights and technology researcher. After studying law at university in the UK, since 1999 he has worked on field investigations of war crimes in Kosovo and Sierra Leone. Since then he has worked with scores of organisations documenting large scale human rights violations in Zimbabwe, Cambodia and others. Tom has also worked for specialised technical and methodological support groups like Human Rights Information and Documentation Systems (HURIDOCS), leading the development of the first web-based open source tool for documenting human rights violations and Tactical Technology Collective where amongst other things he co-wrote the book Visualising Information for Advocacy. As consultant to others including Global Witness, Open Society Foundations, Institute for Development Studies and mySociety, he has written reports about the dramatic worldwide rise in killings of environmental defenders, the state of technology to assist human rights lawyers and the impact of online freedom of information tools. He was the co-founder of Rudiment, a lab for new approaches in technology for human rights.

Niko Para

Niko is Senior Technical Consultant at Security Force Monitor. For over a decade he has been working with non-profits, businesses, and startups to create large scale applications, interactive stories, user-managed databases and archives. Formerly, Niko was the Technical Program Manager for Syrian Archive and Mnemonic, which he helped establish. He joins the Monitor from Deutsche Welle Innovation, where he helped frame and implement government and EU-funded projects. Niko has researched and written extensively about the technologies of digital archiving, user interfaces and programming. He likes functional programming, data pipelines, and emacs.