Photo of Christopher Soghoian

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Christopher Soghoian, Ph.D.
chris@soghoian.net (personal)
csoghoian@aclu.org (work)

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Biography

Christopher Soghoian is a privacy researcher and activist, working at the intersection of technology, law and policy.

He is the Principal Technologist and a Senior Policy Analyst with the Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at the American Civil Liberties Union. He is also a Visiting Fellow at Yale Law School's Information Society Project and a Fellow at the Center for Applied Cybersecurity Research at Indiana University. He is based in Washington, D.C.

Soghoian completed his Ph.D. at Indiana University in 2012, which focused on the role that third party service providers play in facilitating law enforcement surveillance of their customers. In order to gather data, he has made extensive use of the Freedom of Information Act, sued the Department of Justice pro se, and used several other investigative research methods. His research has appeared in publications including the Berkeley Technology Law Journal and been cited by several federal courts, including the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals.

Between 2009 and 2010, he was the first ever in-house technologist at the Federal Trade Commission (FTC)'s Division of Privacy and Identity Protection, where he worked on investigations of Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and Netflix. Prior to joining the FTC, he co-created the Do Not Track privacy anti-tracking mechanism now adopted by all of the major web browsers.

He is a TEDGlobal 2012 Fellow, was an Open Society Foundations Fellow between 2011 and 2012, and was a Student Fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University between 2008-2009.

Publications