Speaker: 

Peter Swire

Title:

The President's NSA Review Group: The Technology Issues

Abstract:

Professor Peter Swire of the Scheller College of Business served on President Obama's Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technology, which published its report in December to widespread public attention.  The President has adopted many of the group's 46 proposals, and others remain under consideration.  This talk will describe the process for drafting the report.  It will discuss the major recommendations, with a particular focus on information technology issues including encryption, zero-day attacks, and the role of offense and defense in cybersecurity. It will also discuss issues related to Internet governance in light of the intense public debate about how to use modern communications networks for diverse activities including surveillance, military operations, e-commerce, and the daily communications of individual users.  The talk will feature an extensive period for Q&A about these topic issues of surveillance, democracy, and technology.

Bio:

Peter Swire joined the Scheller faculty in the fall term of 2013 as the Nancy J. and Lawrence P. Huang Professor, in the Law and Ethics Program. At Georgia Tech, he has appointments by courtesy with the College of Computing and School of Public Policy. Previously, Swire was the C. William O’Neill Professor of Law at the Ohio State University. Swire has been a leading privacy and cyberlaw scholar, government leader, and practitioner since the rise of the Internet in the 1990’s. In 2013, he served as one of five members of President Obama’s Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technology. Prior to that, he was co-chair of the global Do Not Track process for the World Wide Web Consortium. He is a Senior Fellow with the Center for American Progress and the Future of Privacy Forum, and a Policy Fellow with the Center for Democracy and Technology. Under President Clinton, Swire was the Chief Counselor for Privacy, in the U.S. Office of Management and Budget. He is the only person to date to have U.S. government-wide responsibility for privacy policy. In that role, his activities included being White House coordinator for the HIPAA medical privacy rules, chairing a White House task force on how to update wiretap laws for the Internet age, and helping negotiate the U.S.-E.U. Safe Harbor agreement for trans-border data flows. Under President Obama, he served as Special Assistant to the President for Economic Policy. Swire is author of four books and numerous scholarly papers. He has testified often before the Congress, and been quoted regularly in the press. Swire has served on privacy and security advisory boards for companies including Google, IBM, Intel, and Microsoft, and for eight years was a consultant with the global law firm of Morrison & Foerster, LLP. Swire graduated from Princeton University, summa cum laude, and the Yale Law School, where he was an editor of the Yale Law Journal.