Mason McDaniel

Mason McDaniel serves as Chief Technology Officer for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF). In that role, Mr. McDaniel is leading ATF’s IT modernization and migration of all systems into Cloud-hosted infrastructure. He also serves as Chairman of the Board of Directors for CEDR Digital Corps, a non-profit corporation that provides crowdsourced emergency and disaster response services to victims of natural disasters.

Mr. McDaniel started his career working at the FBI’s Engineering Research Facility, where he designed and deployed electronic surveillance systems supporting criminal and counterintelligence investigations. He also designed and built investigative analysis tools to help mine through large volumes of raw investigative data. That work led to a transfer to FBI headquarters, where Mr. McDaniel served as Chief Architect of multiple intelligence analysis systems, as FBI Enterprise Data Architect, and as Senior Advisor to the Chief Technology Officer (CTO).

After 12 years, Mr. McDaniel left the FBI for the private sector and served as Director of two Intelligence IT business units, and then managed a 100-person team building a private Cloud within the Department of Homeland Security. In November of 2015, Mr. McDaniel returned to government service in his current role as ATF’s CTO.

Mr. McDaniel has a Bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering and Master’s degree in Computer Science, with a focus in information security. He has two children, a 13-year-old son and an 9-year-old daughter, and when he has time he enjoys wood carving and drawing portraits.