On Tuesday, August 21, 2001, at 04:30 PM, dmolnar wrote:
Perhaps in evaluating potential programs, it would be helpful to list people in the policy + technology area who are worth looking into. Along perhaps with which institutions they studied at? I'll start. I regret that I'm not familiar with this area, and so I'm sure I'll overlook many interesting people. I'm also not sure what to do about people with some policy interests who are primarily cryptographers -- do we include Ron Rivest because of his work on electronic voting?
Ron Rivest is a good example to make some points about. Suppose Ron were to have some kind of connection to a "policy" or "law" program (presumably at MIT). Would he be a good guy to study under? I'll answer. "Only if you favor his politics." Not that he demands loyalty, so far as I know, but that he is not particularly Cypherpunkish or libertarian. There is no particular reason why a Shamir or an Adleman or a Rivest should be useful. Probably studying under Varian at Berkeley, or Lessig at Stanford, would be better. (Though I don't think people study "under" law professors, do they? From my contacts at Stanford Law, via some talks I gave to Prof. Rader's classes, my impression is that the kids are racing through Stanford Law as fast as Daddy's money will take them, the better to get the big bucks at the prestigious law firms.)
L. Jean Camp (currently at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government)
Was a student at CMU with Doug Tygar. Since then, Tygar has moved to UC-Berkeley; I don't know if Berkeley has any similar technology + policy program. She has done some work which would be of interest, including protocols for anonymous transactions, papers on how to handle law enforcement, and "Pricing Security."(Maybe relevant to the recent debate over insurance incentives for computer security; I haven't read it yet.)
Hal Varian has done much basic work in things like congestion pricing for the Internet. A friend of mine, Robin Hanson, was connected with his group for a while. (I think Robin is now at George Mason U. in Northern Virginia...another place to look at.) Robin is an interesting example of this thread in action. After years of work as a programmer, and after developing the concept of "futures markets" ("I bid $160 that such and such will happen by 2003"), Robin decided to try to put his ideas to better use by going back to school. He didn't take a night school law school degree, thus allowing him to process wills and divorce papers in Outer Nowhere. No, he moved his family to Pasadena and spent several years at Caltech getting his Ph.D. in something related to game theory, economics, and policy. (Some of the people in his group were those who solved the general N-person fair slice of a pie problem. Long known to be solved perfectly for one slice, via "Alice cuts, Bob chooses," it wasn't obvious how to extend this to N slices.) Robin made some substantial economic sacrifices in giving up several years of Silicon Valley income for a load of debt.
Michael Froomkin (U Miami law school) http://www.law.tm/
Wrote "Flood Control on the Information Ocean." Among other things. Used to show up on cypherpunks once upon a time. I don't see where he went, so perhaps it doesn't matter.
Froomkin was fairly active on the list in 1993-96. I visited him when I was in the Miami area. We were on some panels together at some CFP conferences. He's been doing a lot of work on ICANN things now. This is a good example of a point I made in my earlier post: academic interests shift, following trends (translation: worth of granting tenure for). Clipper and key escrow were very hot topics around 1993-95. Today, it's stuff like ICANN and Napster (with Napster fading...). In a few years, these law professors may be concentrating on international whaling laws. (Lessig, in "Code," notes that he was almost exclusively focussed on Eastern European constitutional law issues following the collapse of the Iron Curtain, as this was where some hot issues were. The point being that a person going into "law" (or "policy") should only do so because they love the field of law (or policy) itself, not because they have some ideological axe to grind on crypto policy. "Do what you love, the money may follow." --Tim May