Adv. Deborah Housen-Couriel
Adv. Deborah Housen-Couriel is the Chief Legal Officer and VP Regulation, Konfidas Ltd. and Fellow at the ICT. Her expertise focuses on global and Israeli cybersecurity law and regulation. Her law practice advises clients on high-level strategies for legal planning and regulatory compliance in the areas of corporate governance, preparedness, data protection and retention, internet fraud and cybercrime.
Her practice at Konfidas Ltd. Is supported by ongoing research on critical cybersecurity issues, and she is a research fellow at Reichman University, International Institute for Counter-Terrorism, the Interdisciplinary Cyber Research Center at Tel Aviv University, and the Minerva Center at Haifa University’s Law Faculty. Adv. Housen-Couriel teaches several university courses on cybersecurity law and regulation, with a focus on the interaction among public international law, domestic legal systems and contemporary technological developments in cyberspace. She taught as a guest lecturer at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Exec Ed Program on Cybersecurity: The Intersection of Policy and Technology in 2016. In 2010-11, she co-chaired the National Cyber Initiative’s Policy and Regulation Committee, under the aegis of the Prime Minister’s Office; and served as a member of Israel’s National Cyber Bureau’s Public Committee on the Cyber Professions
Her experience at the international level includes her current work on the Advisory Board for the Global Forum on Cyber Expertise, as a Core Expert on the Manual on International Law Applicable to Military Uses of Outer Space (MILAMOS) project, and as a member of the Legal Research Advisory Group for the Global Commission on the Stability of Cyberspace. Adv. Housen-Couriel was a member of the International Group of Experts that drafted the Tallinn 2.0 manual on state activity in cyberspace; and of the ILA’s Study Group on Cybersecurity, Terrorism and International Law. Adv. Housen-Couriel also serves as Vice Chair of the American Society of International Law’s Law and Technology Interest Group. She is certified with the IBITGQ EU General Data Protection Regulation Foundation and Practitioner (GDPR F and P).
Between 2007 and 2014, Adv. Housen-Couriel was Director of the Wexner Foundation’s Israel Fellowship Program, which develops public leadership at the highest levels in Israel and the US together with the Harvard Kennedy School. Prior to these positions, Adv. Housen-Couriel was Director of the Department of Regulation and International Treaties and served in the Director-General’s Bureau of the Israeli Ministry of Communications (1994-2005). While at the Ministry, she served on delegations to the WTO, the ITU, the Oslo Accords negotiations for telecommunications and spectrum management issues, and those for the peace treaty with Jordan. She received her B.A. in History and Anthropology from Wellesley College and the École de Sciences Politiques in Paris; her LL.B. and LL.M from Hebrew University; and an MC-MPA from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government as a Wexner Foundation Fellow in 2000-2001.
