BU Cyber Alliance Hosts 2/5 Seminar, Featuring Paul Ohm (Georgetown)
12:45 PM – 2:00 PM on Monday, February 5, 2018
Hariri Institute for Computing
How Computer Scientists Can Wrest Tech Policy Out of the Cold, Dead Grip of the Invisible Hand
Paul Ohm
Professor of Law, Georgetown University
Abstract: Tech Policy has an economics problem. Due to a concerted, multi-generational effort of economists operating under the banner of the Chicago School, today we are expected to assess every tech policy proposal using a crabbed, narrow, sometimes even cruel conception of economic analysis, one embracing a libertarian-inflected central focus on economic efficiency, rational actor theory, and economic harm to the exclusion of other approaches from within economics and even more so from other disciplines. The problem with this narrow focus is it misses a richer conversation about the harms of some technologies, conversations rooted outside this small corner of economics and, indeed, outside economics entirely. Professor Ohm will argue that computer scientists have begun to demonstrate how to break away from this cycle of economic dominance. Many of today’s contemporary tech policy debates, around privacy, intellectual property, speech, and civil rights, focus on the decisions of engineers and designers. These technocratic decisionmakers often reject the tools and argot of conventional economics to help them resolve the conflicts they face, favoring instead rigorous approaches borrowed from other disciplines such as sociology, psychology, anthropology, and philosophy, disciplines far better equipped to confront many of the problems of the modern age.
Bio: Paul Ohm is a Professor of Law at the Georgetown University Law Center. He specializes in information privacy, computer crime law, intellectual property, and criminal procedure. He teaches courses in all of these topics and more and he serves as a faculty director for the Center on Privacy and Technology at Georgetown.
In his work, Professor Ohm tries to build new interdisciplinary bridges between law and computer science. Much of his scholarship focuses on how evolving technology disrupts individual privacy. His articleBroken Promises of Privacy: Responding to the Surprising Failure of Anonymization, 57 UCLA Law Review 1701, has sparked an international debate about the need to reshape dramatically the way we regulate privacy. He is commonly cited and quoted by news organizations including the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and NPR.
Professor Ohm began his academic career on the faculty of the University of Colorado Law School, where he also served as the Associate Dean for Academic Affairs and Faculty Director for the Silicon Flatirons Center. From 2012 to 2013, Professor Ohm served as Senior Policy Advisor to the Federal Trade Commission. Before becoming a professor, he served as an Honors Program trial attorney in the U.S. Department of Justice’s Computer Crime and Intellectual Property Section. Before that, he clerked for Judge Betty Fletcher of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit and Judge Mariana Pfaelzer of the United States District Court for the Central District of California. He is a graduate of the UCLA School of Law.
Before attending law school, Professor Ohm worked for several years as a computer programmer and network systems administrator after earning undergraduate degrees in computer science and electrical engineering from Yale University. Today he continues to write thousands of lines of python and perl code each year. Professor Ohm blogs at Freedom to Tinker.