Bill Marczak

In August 2016 Ahmed Mansoor, a human rights activist in the United Arab Emirates, received a text promising "new secrets" about torture. Instead of tapping the link he forwarded it to Marczak. Behind it sat a chain of three zero-days in iOS, dubbed Trident, that took over the phone entirely. Apple shipped a patch within ten days.

The Million Dollar Dissident, written with John Scott-Railton at Ron Deibert's lab, opened a decade of revelations about state-sponsored spyware. Marczak had earlier co-founded Bahrain Watch and earned his PhD at Berkeley.