Yaël Eisenstat

Chief Executive Officer

From counterterrorism to civil society, 25 years protecting people under threat.

Yaël Eisenstat is the Chief Executive Officer of the NGO Information Sharing and Analysis Center (NGO-ISAC), the threat sharing and peer defense community for U.S. nonprofits and civil society organizations. She has spent over 25 years protecting people under threat, first in the national security world and then in industry and civil society working to make digital spaces safer for the public. At NGO-ISAC, she returns to her roots as an operator, bringing the same dedication to protect the organizations that protect others.

Eisenstat spent more than 13 years in U.S. government service, much of it on counterterrorism and counterextremism. She served two years in Nairobi, Kenya, as a Foreign Service Officer focused on counterextremism and political-military affairs. She was a senior intelligence officer at the National Counterterrorism Center and an embedded analyst with the Joint Terrorism Task Force in New York. At the White House she served as a national security advisor to then Vice President Joe Biden from 2009 to 2010.

Over time she came to see the breakdown of public trust and civil discourse as a security threat in its own right and in 2015 began publicly ringing the alarm. In 2018 Facebook hired her as Global Head of Elections Integrity Operations for political advertising. She left after six months and spoke openly about the company’s failure to meet its responsibility to secure elections. She has worked since then to hold online platforms responsible for their effects on public safety and democracy.

She went on to serve as Vice President for the Center for Technology and Society at the Anti-Defamation League. She was most recently Director of Policy and Impact at the Cybersafety Research Center, a research center based at New York University. She has advised the Institute for Security and Technology on technology and democracy, held fellowships at the Berggruen Institute and Cornell Tech’s Digital Life Initiative, and taught national security decision making at New York University’s Center for Global Affairs. In 2023 she testified at a U.S. Senate AI Insight Forum on elections and democracy. Her 2020 TED talk on how social media affects democracy has drawn more than two million views.

Her writing has appeared in numerous outlets, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, TIME, WIRED, and Harvard Business Review. She is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. She holds a master’s degree in international affairs from the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and a bachelor’s degree in international relations from the University of California, Davis.

Media inquiries: Adam Stubits, Chief Operating Officer, [email protected]

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