In an effort to strengthen it’s efforts to combat the sometimes not-so-sanguine efforts of online marketers, Harvard Berkman Center for Internet & Society researcher Christopher Soghoian has accepted a job with the Federal Trade Commission, according to a post on his blog Monday.
While most of us would have no clue who this guy is, he is one of the most respected researchers in the country when it comes to online privacy. At the FTC he would serve as a consultant in the FTC’s Privacy and Identity Protection division.
Soghoian typically would take unscrupulous companies to task on his own blog, but he warned that style of writing would likely not fly in his new gig. “Hopefully, there will be other ways that I can help to achieve this positive change from within the DC beltway,” he mused.
It is good to see the government taking privacy seriously. We’ve seen a good deal of stories in the news regarding lax security resulting in significant data breaches. There’s even a story in the news about it right now regarding the “7-Eleven Hacker,” which has resulted in the disclosure of some 40 million credit card numbers.
As Soghoian puts it to Threat Level:
“It’s a good idea to have someone in a regulatory body who actually understands how the technology works and understands a little more than how to browse through a web page. Someone who knows how to use packet sniffers and can look through the source code and can actually analyze code and see what malware is doing. I think D.C. would be a better place if there were more geeks.”
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