15 Facts About Christopher Soghoian

Christopher Soghoian was born on 1981 and is a privacy researcher and activist.

Christopher Soghoian's dissertation focused on the role that third-party internet and telecommunications service providers play in facilitating law enforcement surveillance of their customers.

Christopher Soghoian is a visiting fellow at Yale Law School's Information Society Project and a TED Senior Fellow.

Christopher Soghoian's research has shed significant light on the use of sophisticated surveillance technologies by US law enforcement agencies, exposing such techniques to public debate and criticism.

Christopher Soghoian first gained public attention in 2006 as the creator of a website that generated fake airline boarding passes.

On October 26,2006, Christopher Soghoian created a website that allowed visitors to generate fake boarding passes for Northwest Airlines.

Christopher Soghoian claimed that his motivation for the website was to focus national attention on the ease with which a passenger could evade the No Fly List.

In June 2009, Christopher Soghoian co-authored an open letter to Google with 37 prominent security and privacy experts, urging the company to protect the privacy of its customers by enabling HTTPS encryption by default for Gmail and its other cloud based services.

Christopher Soghoian has in recent years continued his HTTPS advocacy, calling on news media, law firms, government agencies and other organizations to encrypt their own websites.

In October 2010, Christopher Soghoian filed a complaint with the FTC, in which he claimed that Google was intentionally leaking search queries to the sites that users visited after they clicked on a link from the search results page.

In May 2011, Christopher Soghoian was approached by public relations firm Burson-Marsteller and asked to write an anti-Google op-ed, criticizing the company for privacy issues associated with its social search product.

In May 2011, Christopher Soghoian filed a complaint with the FTC, in which he claimed that online backup service Dropbox was deceiving its customers about the security of its services.

One month later, Christopher Soghoian was quoted by Forbes, in a lengthy article about the zero day market, describing the firms and individuals who sell software exploits as "the modern-day merchants of death" selling "the bullets of cyberwar".

In October, 2014, Christopher Soghoian called attention to the fact that the FBI had, in 2007, impersonated the Associated Press in an effort to deliver malware to a teenager in Washington state who had threatened to bomb his high school.

Christopher Soghoian is the nephew of Sal Christopher Soghoian, the former Automation Product Manager at Apple Inc.