About
Tor Ekeland is a trial, appellate, and business lawyer licensed and based in New York City with a boutique practice national and international in scope. WIRED profiled him as "the go-to guy for computer crime defense." He works at the intersection of digital technology, regulatory compliance, white collar criminal defense, and complex commercial litigation. He advises founders, executives, businesses, and individuals on transactional and regulatory issues involving computer law, financial technology, digital assets, computer systems, and emerging questions of digital privacy and constitutional law. He represents clients in federal white collar criminal matters, government investigations, extradition, appeals, and civil disputes.
Tor’s work is best known for his work involving the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) and matters of first impression in Computer Law, including cases involving alleged unauthorized access, digital evidence, government surveillance, virtual currency, and technology-related business disputes. Often this work involves national security issues, and he's handled Espionage Act and FISA cases. He represents clients at every stage of a federal matter, from investigations and charging decisions through pretrial litigation, trial, sentencing, and appeal. His clients face legal issues arising from technology evolving faster than the law.
Tor counsels technology and financial-technology businesses on transactions and regulatory compliance in the DeFi space and on issues where computer and securities law intersect. This ranges from business formation and structuring, financing and commercial transactions, and assessing the regulatory implications of innovative products and services. For digital-asset and online businesses, he advises on issues involving money transmission and licensing, anti-money-laundering (AML) obligations, Know Your Customer (KYC) regulations, sanctions, data practices, and governance. His deep experience defending clients prosecuted by the Department of Justice (DOJ) for computer crimes, AML violations, wire fraud, bank fraud and securities violations informs his regulatory counsel.
He counsels clients responding to inquiries from the Department of Justice and other government authorities, including matters involving wire fraud, money laundering, securities-related allegations, and financial regulation. His work has included representing clients with cross-border issues arising from U.S. federal criminal proceedings. In civil matters, he handles technology-focused disputes and appellate issues, including questions involving online platforms, privacy, speech, and constitutional protections.
Before founding Tor Ekeland Law, Tor was a complex commercial and securities litigator in the New York office of Sidley Austin LLP. His work there included matters involving government investigations, securities and financial-regulatory issues, and complex financial-derivatives litigation. That experience continues to inform his approach to technically demanding criminal, regulatory, and commercial matters.
Tor has represented clients in federal courts across the country and has briefed and argued appeals in multiple federal circuits. His work as lead counsel in United States v. Auernheimer included the Third Circuit appeal that vacated the conviction on venue grounds. His representative work includes federal computer-crime, white-collar, and cross-border matters involving the CFAA, digital evidence, alleged unauthorized access, government surveillance, national-security issues, financial-markets prosecutions, and blockchain-forensics evidence. In these matters, he has addressed constitutional, privacy, speech, and due-process questions raised by the government’s reactionary repression of evolving technology.
Tor earned his J.D., cum laude, from Fordham University School of Law, where he served as Senior Articles Editor of Volume 74 of the Fordham Law Review and received the Fordham Law Award for Excellence in the Study of Constitutional Law. He is the author of “Suspending Habeas Corpus: Article I, Section 9, Clause 2, of the United States Constitution and the War on Terror”, published in the Fordham Law Review. In 2018, he completed the invitation-only three-week program at Gerry Spence’s Trial Lawyers College. He regularly trains with the Trial Lawyers College and in 2025 attended the Ethos Advocacy Institute. He frequently speaks and writes on computer law, the CFAA, and policy issues at the intersection of technology, privacy, and the Constitution.
Tor’s work appears regularly in the national and international press. The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, the BBC, Law 360, Columbia Journalism Review, Ars Technica, CoinDesk, Rolling Stone, Mother Jones, and Bloomberg Law, among others, cover his cases or quote him on cybercrime, the CFAA, cybersecurity, digital assets, Bitcoin, blockchain forensics, and technology-related legal issues. His cases appear in books, including Gabriella Coleman’s Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy: The Many Faces of Anonymous (Verso, 2014), which discusses United States v. Auernheimer; Andy Greenberg’s Tracers in the Dark: The Global Hunt for the Crime Lords of Cryptocurrency (Doubleday, 2022), which discusses the Bitcoin Fog prosecution of Roman Sterlingov; and Carrie Goldberg’s Nobody’s Victim (Plume, 2019), which discusses Herrick v. Grindr, a CDA Section 230 case in which Tor served as co-counsel.
The Firm’s work has been the subject of or featured in five documentaries, Troll Inc. (2017), Citizen Love (2017), Trust Machine: The Story of Blockchain (2018), Enemies of the State (2020), and The Battle for Justina Pelletier (2022) with a sixth in production. Tor regularly appears on national and international television, radio, and podcasts.
He was selected by his peers to Super Lawyers for 2020-25.
