Julia is an award-winning investigative journalist, founder of the non-profit journalism firm Proof News, bestselling author and New York Times Opinion Writer. She has won and been a two-time finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Explanatory Reporting for her work at The Wall Street Journal and ProPublica. She founded the non-profit newsroom The Markup. And she is the author of the bestsellers “Dragnet Nation: A Quest for Privacy, Security and Freedom in a World of Relentless Surveillance” (Times Books, 2014) and “Stealing MySpace: The Battle to Control the Most Popular Website in America” (Random House, March 2009). She holds a BA in mathematics from the University of Chicago and an MBA from Columbia University's Graduate School of Business. She is currently a Walter Shorenstein Media and Democracy Fellow at the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School and was previously an entrepreneur-in-residence at the Brown Institute for Media Innovation at Columbia Journalism School.