Cade is the founder of the New Design Congress, an international research organisation forging a nuanced understanding of technology’s role as a social, political and environmental accelerant. With a multi-disciplinary background in information security, interface politics and digital systems, Cade and his team study digital infrastructure to understand how technology at scale influences the perspectives and safety of policy-makers, activists and researchers. Through this work, Cade has led consultations with PEN International, UCL London, Google, Mozilla, the European Centre for Constitutional and Human Rights, the International Institute for the Environment and Development, the European Commission, Protocol Labs, the Deutschland Bundestag Prototype Fund, the Center for Digital Resilience, the Algorithmic Transparency Institute and many others.

Prior to founding the New Design Congress, Cade spent ten years leading design-focused digital security projects in Australia, the United States, Korea, Germany, Singapore and the United Kingdom. He was an information security researcher and head of production at the Berlin-based non-profit Tactical Tech, providing security consultation and bringing the NGO’s activism to audiences worldwide. He contributed to early prototypes of the secure messaging app Signal and was Chief Design Officer at SpiderOak, then a Snowden approved no-knowledge cloud storage company.

Cade holds national and Paralympic world records, having represented Australia in international disability swimming between 1999 and 2006.