Mr. Miguelángel Verde Garrido is a doctoral candidate at the Graduate School for Global Politics, Freie Universität Berlin (Germany), where he researches how state and corporate control of information and communications technologies impact the political agency of civil society. He has a BA in Philosophy from Universidad Católica Andrés Bello (Caracas, Venezuela) and a MA in Political Science and Political Philosophy from Kyoto University (Japan), where he studied after being granted a scholarship by the Ministry of Education of Japan. In 2016, Miguel was awarded an Annual Paper Prize and an Early Career Researcher Award by the Surveillance Studies Network for a published article related to his doctoral research.