About

Jairus Khan, head and shoulders, in a black shirt against a bright window
Photo by Maxwell Lander. Click for hi res.

Short bio

Jairus Khan is a designer, hacker, communications strategist and activist in Halifax, Nova Scotia. He led global outreach for Mozilla's Internet Health Report, ran digital strategy at the Internet Society, rebuilt the Bank of Canada's web presence during the 2008 financial crisis, and unsuccessfully lobbied Mark Carney to have Wolverine replace Sir Wilfrid Laurier on the five-dollar bill. He thinks a lot about what AI does to people, and what it could do for them if we did things differently.

Longer bio

Jairus Khan is a designer, hacker, communications strategist and activist in Halifax, Nova Scotia.

At the Mozilla Foundation he led global outreach for the Internet Health Report, Mozilla's flagship publication on AI, cybersecurity, misinformation and digital rights. He helped build it, organized its global committee of community leaders in ten countries, and took it to UN Headquarters, Harvard and hacker conventions.

Before that he was the Internet Society's Digital Strategist, where he represented the organization at IETF meetings and UN Internet Governance Forums, and led user experience for its global rebrand. Before THAT, he rebuilt the Bank of Canada's web presence during the 2008 financial crisis, wrote its first social media guidelines, formed an open-source coalition with the European Central Bank and the Federal Reserve, and unsuccessfully lobbied Mark Carney to have Wolverine replace Sir Wilfrid Laurier on the five-dollar bill.

He is a Certified Ethical Hacker, the first to teach the certification in Canada, and does source-code security research. He thinks a lot about what AI does to people, and what it could do for them if we did things differently.

Much much longer bio

Jairus Khan is a designer, hacker, communications strategist and activist in Halifax, Nova Scotia. He grew up on the internet John Perry Barlow's Declaration promised, watched it turn into surveillance and misinformation, and is worried we're seeing the same song now with new tech.

At the Mozilla Foundation he led global outreach for the Internet Health Report, Mozilla's flagship publication on AI, cybersecurity, misinformation and digital rights. He helped build it, organized its global committee of community leaders in ten countries, ran the print edition, and took the report to UN Headquarters, Harvard, RightsCon, the Creative Commons Global Summit, hacker conventions, fandom cons, and beyond. He also had a hand in New York City's edition, the first by a city, gave talks on AI surveillance, and trained people who work with vulnerable populations to spot threats like being tracked by an abusive partner.

Before that he was Digital Strategist at the Internet Society, the non-profit home of the Internet Engineering Task Force. He represented ISOC at IETF meetings and UN Internet Governance Forums, managed the client side of the internetsociety.org rebuild, led user experience for its global rebrand, and ran communications for InterCommunity, its annual forum. A lot fewer hacker conventions, a lot more multistakeholder governance.

Alongside that he ran Townhall Communications, the firm he co-founded with Audra Williams for unions, progressive organizations, and the Dog Shaming people. Townhall built the digital strategy for Hassan Yussuff's campaign for the presidency of the Canadian Labour Congress, which Yussuff won by forty votes, and ran the campaign that got Linda McQuaig the federal NDP nomination in Toronto Centre. It also did crisis communications for Crown corporations that found themselves in a bit of a situation on social media. Before Townhall he spent a year at University Health Network building Spinal Cord Connections, a platform for people living with spinal cord injuries, their families and their clinicians. He gathered the requirements from patients, wrote the community rules, and moderated the forums himself.

Before THAT, he rebuilt the Bank of Canada's web presence during the 2008 financial crisis and wrote its first social media guidelines. He advised the Governing Council on whether a central bank had any business in open-source communities, talked the Bank into its first upstream contributions, pulled in the European Central Bank and the Federal Reserve to do the same, and unsuccessfully lobbied Mark Carney to have Wolverine replace Sir Wilfrid Laurier on the five-dollar bill. Before the Bank he taught hacking, as the first Certified Ethical Hacker instructor in Canada, to rooms that included the RCMP, National Defence, the Canadian Forces and the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission. Before any of it he made websites, starting when Netscape 2 was the new and buggy browser.

These days he works with organizations that have something technical to explain or a decision to make about tech that will impact other people, hunts for bugs in other people's source code, and builds things, the more presentable of which are on the projects page. He has been organizing against racists and sexists since the nineties, and moderates a few large online communities where that is still most of the work.

He spent most of the 2000s DJing goth and industrial nights in Ottawa, co-founded Dark Carnival, an arts festival there that ran for ten years, and in 2012 closed his opening set at the Kinetik Festival with a video about what was wrong with the headliners. He records industrial and noise music as Ad·ver·sary and, with Nick Thériault, as Antigen Shift. Their new album, Verified Unidentified, is out now on Artoffact Records.

Earlier credits appear under Jairus Pryor.

Last revised 2026-09-02.