Peter Swire

Professor Peter Swire, J.D., is an associate director of the Institute for Information Security & Privacy (IISP) at Georgia Tech for the area of policy research.  Swire has been a privacy and cyberlaw scholar, government leader, and practitioner since the rise of the Internet in the 1990’s. He came to the Georgia Institute of Technology in 2013, where he is the Elizabeth and Tommy Holder Chair in the Scheller College of Business, with appointments by courtesy with the College of Computing and School of Public Policy. He is senior counsel with the law firm of Alston & Bird LLP.

Swire 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 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 -- the first person 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 rule, 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 was special assistant to the President for economic policy.

Swire is author of five books and numerous scholarly papers. He has testified often before the Congress, and been quoted regularly in the press. He has served on privacy and security advisory boards for companies including Google, IBM, Intel, and Microsoft, as well as a number of start-ups.

Swire graduated from Princeton University, summa cum laude, and the Yale Law School, where he was an editor of the Yale Law Journal.

 

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