Communications of the ACM
Ftc's First Chief Technologist: Drm Basher Ed Felten
Edward W. Felten
Princeton University
What do you get when you spend your academic career exposing broken DRM schemes, suing the recording industry when they try to silence you, showing the insecurity of e-voting machines, filing DMCA exemption requests, and freeing US court documents from behind their paywall? You get to be the first-ever Chief Technologist at the Federal Trade Commission.
Princeton computer science professor Ed Felten was tapped for a one-year stint at the FTC in a decision so shockingly sane that it's still a bit hard to believe. Felten has a terrific reputation as both a researcher and advocate, someone with deep technical knowledge, a pro-consumer/pro-openness/pro-tinkering bias, and an aversion to posturing and zealotry.
In the last decade alone, Felten and his students and Princeton's Center for Information Technology Policy (where Ars alumnus Tim Lee currently hangs his hat) have broken the music industry's SDMI encryption scheme, filed a lawsuit agains the RIAA, joined the Electronic Frontier Foundation board, and showed us all how to break a badly secured e-voting machine in under one minute. They also manage to run the popular "Freedom to Tinker" blog.
From Arstechnica
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