Draft:Jason Blazakis

Jason Blazakis is an American author and academic. He is a professor at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies and an adjunct professor at Johns Hopkins University.

Career
From 2003 to 2004, Blazakis served as a domestic intelligence analyst at the Congressional Research Service.

From 2008 until 2018, Blazakis was the Director of the Counterterrorism Finance and Designations Office within the Bureau of Counterterrorism at the Department of State. Blazakis was the recipient of the Superior Honor Award, Meritorious Honor Award, and the Benjamin Franklin Award for Public Diplomacy while working at the State Department. While working at the State Department, Blazakis taught evening courses at Johns Hopkins University and the University of Maryland, College Park.

In 2017, State Magazine wrote about Blazakis and how he led a U.S. delegation to meet with counterparts from the Government of India. This event was the first-ever formal exchange between the U.S. and India on terrorist designations issues.

As the Director of MIIS’s Center on Terrorism, Extremism, and Counterterrorism (CTEC), Blazakis' team researched the impact of artificial intelligence Chatbots on the spread of disinformation. Blazakis also is the author of a research paper that provides an overview of the potential malicious use of GPT-2.

Blazakis is an expert on the Wagner Group. He provided evidence on the Wagner Group for the United Kingdom Foreign Affairs Select Committee and the Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe. Blazakis is sanctioned by the Government of Russia in response to this work.

Blazakis teaches courses on terrorism financing, the rise of the Islamic State, and an introduction to terrorism at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey (MIIS).

Blazakis wrote the first chapter on Colombia's Intelligence Community in, "The Handbook of Latin American and Caribbean Intelligence Cultures", published by Rowman & Littlefield in 2022.

In 2023, Blazakis entered the Democratic primary for the House seat representing New Jersey's 7th congressional district.