Simson Garfinkel (Assoc)

Simson L. Garfinkel is a Computer Scientist at the National Institute of Standards and Technology's Information Technology Laboratory. Garfinkel's research interests include big data, privacy, usability, social justice, and data fusion. He holds seven US patents and has published dozens of research articles for his work in computer security and digital forensics. He is an ACM Fellow, an IEEE Senior Member, as a member of the National Association of Science Writers.

Garfinkel is the author or co-author of fourteen books on computing. He is perhaps best known for his book Database Nation: The Death of Privacy in the 21st Century. 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. 

Prior earning his PhD, Garfinkel worked as a science journalist, during which time he wrote  more than a thousand articles about science, technology, and technology policy in the popular press. He has won numerous national journalism awards, including the Jesse H. Neal National Business Journalism Award. Today he mostly writes for MIT's Technology Review Magazine and the technologyreview.com website.

As an entrepreneur, Garfinkel founded five companies between 1989 and 2000, including Vineyard.NET, which provided Internet service on Martha's Vineyard to more than a thousand customers from 1995 through 2005, and Sandstorm Enterprises, an early developer of computer forensic tools.

Garfinkel received three Bachelor of Science degrees from MIT in 1987, a Master's of Science in Journalism from Columbia University in 1988, and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from MIT in 2005.

1. 2023 IEEE Cybersecurity Awards for Practice/, awarded to John Abowd and Simson Garfinkel for Contributions to Privacy-Preserving Distribution of U.S. Census Data
2. 2023 Department of Commerce US Census Bureau Gold Medal for Scientific/Engineering Achievement awarded to Victoria A. Velkoff, Ryan R. Cumings, Michael B. Hawes, Philip Daniel Leclerc, Pavel Zhuravlev, Matthew Spence, Cynthia Davis Hollingsworth, James C A Whitehorne, John M. Abowd, Simson L. Garfinkel. "This group is honored for the practical design, testing, and implementation of a cutting-edge disclosure avoidance system for the legally mandated 2020 Census P.L. 94-171 Redistricting Data Summary File, thereby guaranteeing the quality and availability of Census data for critical societal purposes, including the redrawing of Federal and state legislative voting districts, while providing mathematically provable guarantees of the confidentiality of census respondents' information."
3. 2023 PET Award, awarded to John M. Abowd, Robert Ashmead, Ryan Cumings-Menon, Simson Garfinkel, Micah Heineck, Christine Heiss, Robert Johns, Daniel Kifer, Philip Leclerc, Ashwin Machanavajjhala, Brett Moran, William Sexton, Matthew Spence, Pavel Zhuravlev. "The 2020 Census Disclosure Avoidance System TopDown Algorithm". Harvard Data Science Review Special Issue 2: Differential Privacy for the 2020 U.S. Census.
4. 2023 Department of Commerce US Census Bureau Bronze Medal awarded to the Harvard Data Science Review Symposium Disclosure Avoidance Team, "for its contributions to the field of data science through its role in organizing the Harvard Data Science Review symposium on differential privacy and the 2020 Census. This marked the first major public engagement of the data science and privacy communities in the design and implementation of formal privacy solutions for large-scale statistical data releases."
5. 2021 Fellow, American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)
6. 2019 Fellow, Institute for Electrical and Electronics Engineers (certificate)
7. 2019 Department of Commerce US Census Bureau Bronze Medal Award awarded to the 2018 End-to-End Test Disclosure Avoidance Team "For successful execution of the 2018 End-to- End Test Disclosure Avoidance System that generated microdata in a formerly private manner, while satisfying complex requirements, thus demonstrating the feasibility of utilizing high-quality and rigorous disclosure avoidance protection to be applied to the 2020 Decennial Census." (program)
8. 2017 NIST Information Technology Laboratory Outstanding Standards Document Award for NIST SP 800-188, Trustworthy Email
9. 2013 Best Paper Award, "Language Translation for File Paths," DFRWS, Aug 4-7, Monterey
10. 2013 Fellow, Association for Computing Machinery (certificate)