Tarah Wheeler has joined the advisory board of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). In her new role, the policy expert and security researcher will offer expertise on a variety of different subjects, including data privacy, diversity, and the future of cybersecurity.
Wheeler is a longtime veteran of the cybersecurity industry. Her career includes previous stops at Symantec Website Security, where she served as the senior director of engineering and principal security advocate, and at Splunk, where she served as head of offensive security and data privacy. She also founded the Red Queen Technologies security consultancy, and designed encrypted mobile systems for Silent Circle.
Shortly before joining the EFF advisory board, Wheeler received the US/UK Fulbright Cyber Security Scholar Award, and she will soon be conducting research to help form a definition of cyber war crimes. That research will be carried out at the University of Oxford in collaboration with the UK National Health Service (NHS).
In addition to those accomplishments, Wheeler is an International Security Fellow at New America’s International Security Program, and the lead author of the 2016 best-seller Women In Tech: Take Your Career to The Next Level With Practical Advice And Inspiring Stories.
The EFF itself has continued to advocate for people’s digital privacy rights during the COVID-19 pandemic. The organization warned about the rising number of phishing attacks in the early days of the crisis, and stressed that any surveillance measures that are used to track the spread of the virus should still meet rigorous policy standards and be deployed with respect for people’s civil liberties. In that regard, the EFF recently opposed a California bill that would have allowed the state to use facial recognition to monitor the virus, largely because the bill did not have sufficient safeguards to prevent the abuse of such a system.
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