Board | Civil Liberties Defense Center

Rebecca Smith, President

Rebecca Smith Rebecca is a public interest attorney in Missoula, Montana specializing in public interest law for low-income clients in Montana and Idaho, including representing low-income or marginalized individuals and non-profit community groups in cases involving environmental protection, activist criminal defense, and police misconduct. Rebecca formerly served on the board of directors for the Buffalo Field Campaign.

Dana Johnson, Secretary

Dana Johnson Dana is a public interest attorney in Moscow, ID with a legal practice focusing on federal environmental litigation in the Big Wild of the Northern Rockies and criminal defense. Dana offers litigation, education, and support services, including Legal Observer coordination, to regional non-profit groups and activists working in the fields of environmental and animal protection. She is committed to providing creative legal analysis and representation realizing that social and environmental justice often demand a firm challenge to the status quo.

Glencora Borradaile

Glencora, Associate Professor in the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Oregon State University, believes that communication should be private and secure by default and worries about corporate and state threats to First Amendment-protected activities. At OSU, they have initiated a National Science Foundation-funded research program whose mission is to support the digital needs of activists, and ensure that everyone can communicate freely and safely, regardless of their identity. They also created and teach an interdisciplinary course on communications security and social movements that is offered through OSU.

Cindy Cordova

The oldest child of Mexican immigrants, Cindy was exposed to the importance of civil rights, equality and education early on. She has worked with several locally based education, art and health-based nonprofits, and has additional experience working with community resource centers and harm reduction programs. She has 15 years of professional and personal experience working with people with disabilities including advocacy, vocational rehabilitation and inclusive education. She has worked for the CLDC in different capacities, ranging from office intern to undergrad law clerk. Currently she works at a public health center as a bilingual population health coordinator and health educator. She is pursuing a master’s degree in public health, with a focus in epidemiology.

Kerul Dyer

Kerul Dyer spent the past 25 years pursuing justice by providing strategic communications and logistical support to the front lines of emerging social movements. Her contributions include exposing corruption and providing large-scale, direct relief in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, elevating stories of those impacted by the coal industry, and uncovering decades-long racist policies governing the criminal justice system. Her lifelong passion to support Indigenous sovereignty, economic and social justice, and to defend natural ecosystems and wildlife have led her to work as a communication director for several social, environmental, and climate justice organizations. Kerul has now shifted her focus to a specific investigative journalism pursuit into the environmental and human rights impacts stemming from the ongoing Syrian Civil War. Her current project involves working with a diverse team of local and international journalists to produce realtime correspondence of breaking news from the region.

Mookie Moss

Mookie is the Co-Founder and Co-Director of The Bonfire Collective, an organization that uses the universality of agriculture to address international issues of social and environmental injustice and colonial inequality. As an organic farmer for the last twenty years, Mookie specialized in training the next generation of farmers and co-authored the Agricultural Reclamation Act which fought for family scale farms against the incursion of industrial agriculture. He was the President of Big Wildlife and led a campaign for cougar conservation in the State of Oregon. Mookie has organized behind the scenes and worked on the front lines throughout the Americas in the struggle against police brutality, economic imperialism, and the privatization of our natural resources. He can be found anywhere between his farm in the Little Applegate Valley of Southern Oregon and South Central Bolivia.

Kiran Oommen

Kiran Oommen is a Malayali-American community organizer, gardener, and musician based in Seattle, WA. They first connected with the CLDC at the first Next Generation Climate Justice Action Camp as a teenager, going on from there to get involved in the radical environmental movement in the Pacific Northwest. The last couple years They have helped organize the camp, and interned at the CLDC in the summer of 2017. Kiran is a plaintiff on the Juliana vs. USA federal climate change lawsuit, and associates with a variety of other direct action groups in the Pacific Northwest. They do vocals for the ecofeminist powerviolence band Pickax, and was the primary songwriter/vocalist/mandolinist for the anarcho-folk punk group Geophagia. Kiran is a part of a collectively run DIY space in Seattle where they book punk shows and radical events.