Mishi Choudhary

Mishi Choudhary is a technology lawyer and an online civil liberties activist with law

practice in New York and New Delhi. The Open magazine calls her an emerging legal guardian of the free and open internet. In 2010, she founded SFLC.in, a New Delhi headquartered Digital Rights organization. Under her direction, SFLC.in has become the premier non-profit organization representing the rights of Internet users and protecting digital freedoms. In special Consultative Status with the Economic and Social Council of the United Nations (ECOSOC), SFLC.in promotes innovation and open access to knowledge by helping developers make great Free and Open Source Software, protect privacy and civil liberties for citizens in the digital world. At SFLC.in, Mishi has brought landmark litigation, led several successful campaigns and created educational trainings for policy makers and legislators on issues of digital freedoms. She has played an instrumental part in constitutional proceedings that brought in the landmark Shreya Singhal judgment on online free speech and content moderation. She was part of the SavetheInternet.in that galvanized support of over a million Indian citizens for net neutrality and fought against FreeBasics by Facebook. SFLC.in maintains world’s first and India’s only tracker on Internet Shutdowns, one of its kind Free Speech tracker that tracks all forms of censorship, analog and digital, amongst other projects.

She is currently the SVP and General Counsel at Virtru, a global data encryption and digital privacy provider. Until August , 2022, she was the Legal Director of the New York based Software Freedom Law Center and Partner at Moglen & Associates. For several years, Mishi was the primary legal representative of many of the world's most significant free software developers and non-profit distributors, including Debian and the Apache Software Foundation. As of 2017, Mishi was the only lawyer in the world simultaneously to appear on briefs in the US and Indian Supreme Courts in the same Term. In 2015 she was named one of the Asia Society's 21 young leaders building Asia's future. In 2016 she was inducted into the Aspen Global Leadership Network by the Aspen Institute.

Mishi has an Executive MBA from Harvard Business School, Masters degree in Law from Columbia University in the City of New York, a Legum Baccalaureus (LL.B.) degree with Honors and a Bachelors degree in Political Science from the University of Delhi.