Daniel Weitzner holds the 3Com Founders Principal Research Scientist position at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and is the founding director of the MIT Internet Policy Research Initiative. He also teaches Internet public policy in MIT’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. He has been a leader in the development of Internet public policy from its inception, making fundamental contributions to the successful fight for strong online free expression protection in the U.S. Supreme Court, and crafting laws that provide protection against government surveillance of email and web browsing data. His research pioneered the development of accountable systems to enable computational treatment of legal rules. His research also focuses on encryption and surveillance, human-computer interaction and privacy, election security, Internet policy, web science, and digital contact tracing. He earned a BA in philosophy from Swarthmore College, and a JD from SUNY Buffalo Law School.

Selected Publications

• Cohen, I. G., Gostin, L., Weitzner, D. (2020). Digital Smartphone Tracking for COVID-19 Public Health and Civil Liberties in Tension. Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) 323(23):2371-2372.
• Ivers, L. & Weitzner, D (2020). Can digital contact tracing make up for lost time? The Lancet.
• Feigenbaum, J, & Weitzner, D. (2018). On the incommensurability of laws and technical mechanisms: Or, what cryptography can’t do. In Cambridge International Workshop on Security Protocols.

Media

• Apr. 8, 2020: MIT News, Bluetooth signals from your smartphone could automate Covid-19 contact tracing while preserving privacy.
• Feb. 13, 2020: MIT News, MIT researchers identify security vulnerabilities in voting app.
• Jun. 5, 2019: Brookings, Rulemaking and its discontents: Moving from principle to practice in federal privacy legislation.

• Mar. 11, 2019: New York Times, Top Universities Join to Push ‘Public Interest Technology.’