Simson L. Garfinkel

Simson Garfinkel received undergraduate degrees in Chemistry, Political Science, and the Science, Technology and Society program from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1987; a MS in Journalism from Columbia University in 1988; and a PhD in Computer Science from MIT in 2005. He has over 30 years of research and development experience with over 50 publications in peer-reviewed journals and conferences. His research interests include digital forensics, usable security, and technology transfer. In 2017 Garfinkel was appointed the the Senior Computer Scientist for Confidentiality and Data Access at the US Census Bureau, where he chairs the Bureau's Disclosure Review Board; he was previously a Senior Advisor at the US National Institute of Standards and Technology, and an Associate Professor in the Computer Science Department at the Naval Postgraduate School. He is a fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery, holds a PhD in Computer Science from MIT, and teaches as an adjunct faculty member at the George Mason University in Vienna, Virginia. Garfinkel shared the 2017 NIST Information Technology Laboratory Outstanding Standards Document Award for NIST SP 800-188, Trustworthy Email, and the 2011 Department of Defense Value Engineering Achievement Award for his leadership in the Bulk Extractor Program. He has received three Best Paper awards at the DFRWS digital forensics research symposium, as well as multiple national awards for his work in technology journalism. Garfinkel is the author or co-author of fourteen books on computing. His book Database Nation: The Death of Privacy in the 21st Century (O'Reilly, 2000) discussed the impact of technology on privacy in the 20th and 21st centuries. His book Practical UNIX and Internet Security (co-authored with Gene Spafford and Alan Schwartz), has sold more than 250,000 copies and been translated into more than a dozen languages since the first edition was published in 1991.