Bio

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Mr. Mason McDaniel has over 23 years of federal government service and has served as the Chief Technology Officer for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) since 2015. 

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. That work led to a transfer to FBI headquarters following 9/11/2001, where Mr. McDaniel served as Chief Architect of multiple counterterrorism analysis systems, as FBI Enterprise Data Architect, and as Senior Advisor to the CTO. Mr. McDaniel left the FBI for the private sector in 2009, serving as the Director of two Intelligence IT business units and leading a 100-person IT modernization team at CBP, before returning to government service in 2015 as ATF’s CTO.

Since 2015, Mr. McDaniel has led countless IT working groups, development efforts, and modernization initiatives. This includes migrating all ATF's legacy systems to the Cloud, implementing a deployment automation capability, developing and refining IT governance policies, and training and directing IT teams on Agile and DevSecOps methods. Mr. McDaniel is responsible for supervising all cyber security operations for ATF, and in addition to his CTO role, he served as acting Chief Information Security Officer for a year until ATF’s current CISO was hired.

In 2018, Mr. McDaniel was awarded the Lifesaving Award by the ATF Director. Following catastrophic flooding in Houston from Hurricane Harvey, in his personal time Mr. McDaniel worked with a handful of friends to rapidly build a set of technical tools, and to grow a global team of over 700 volunteers who helped facilitate the rescue of over 5,500 people and over 350 pets. 

When the Deputy Attorney General established a new Emerging Technology Board in 2024, Mr. McDaniel was selected as one of the 14 board members from across DOJ. Mr. McDaniel was then named to co-chair a new ETB working group responsible for conducting an inventory and analysis of all uses of artificial intelligence across DOJ. 

Mr. McDaniel holds a Bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering and a Master’s degree in Computer Science with a focus in Information Security. He is married to his life-long friend, Taryn, and has two children, 19 and 14, and two stepchildren, 24 and 21. When he has time, he enjoys wood carving, drawing portraits, and playing with his backyard forge.