IT Privacy Advocate to Join NIST
Ari Schwartz, a longtime advocate of Internet privacy rights, will be leaving the Center for Democracy and Technology to become senior Internet policy adviser at the National Institute of Standards and Technology. He'll begin his new job on Aug. 30.
Schwartz, chief operating officer of the not-for-profit public interest group, says he sees the NIST job as a really great opportunity.
"I have always had great admiration and respect for those in public service. I have been on the look out for the right position in the federal government and I'm confident that this is it. NIST's work on Internet issues is at a critical juncture and NIST and the Department of Commerce are taking the lead on some really key issues right now.
NIST is part of the Commerce Department, and Schwartz will work with Commerce's Internet Policy Task Force on information security and other issues. He'll serve as an advisor to NIST Director Patrick Gallagher on some interagency working groups, especially the subcommittee on standards under the National Science and Technology Council's Committee on Technology, as well as Internet-related projects overseen by Cita Furlani, the head of NIST's Information Technology Laboratory.
"Those projects already have well-establish goals with ambitious objectives and I hope that I can be a key player in getting that work done and taking on new challenges as they arise."
Furlani noted Schwartz's commitment to Internet privacy as an asset for NIST:
"That's one advantages we see on having him on board. We will have that perspective more readily available to us."
According to his CDT biography, Schwartz's work at the center has focused on increasing individual control over personal and public information. A regular witness before Congress and executive branch agencies, Schwartz promotes privacy protections and expanding access to government information via the Internet.
Schwartz also has led the Anti-Spyware Coalition, a group of anti-spyware software companies, academics and public interest groups dedicated to defeating spyware. In 2006, Schwartz won the RSA award for Excellence in Public Policy for his work building the ASC and other efforts against spyware. He serves as a member of the government's Information Security and Privacy Advisory Board.
In an interview with GovInfoSecurity.com last year, Schwartz discussed how federal law has not kept up with technology, such as data mining, as well as the problems citizens face with a decades-old Privacy Act that Congress enacted years before of anyone ever heard of the Internet.
Schwartz's advocacy for updating the Privacy Act may have been in vain so far, but now he gets to play a role in one of the more influential organizations that define best practices on how government agencies and other organizations assure information security and privacy.