Peter Swire

Peter Swire has been a leader on privacy and cybersecurity issues since the rise of the Internet in the 1990’s, blending the roles of scholar, government official, practitioner, and public policy leader. Swire now is the C. William O’Neill Professor of Law at the Ohio State University, a Senior Fellow at the Future of Privacy Forum and the Center for American Progress, and Policy Fellow at the Center for Democracy and Technology. Under President Clinton, Swire served in the White House as the Chief Counselor for Privacy, in the Office of Management and Budget. He is the only person to date to have U.S. government-wide responsibility for privacy policy. In that role, he was the White House coordinator for the proposed and final HIPAA medical privacy rules, and chaired a White House task force on how to update wiretap laws for the Internet age. He participated in the negotiation of the Safe Harbor agreement for data flows between the European Union and the United States. He also played a leading role on topics including financial privacy, Internet privacy, encryption, e-commerce policy, and cybersecurity. During the Obama/Biden transition, Swire was Counsel to the New Media Team, and worked with the FTC and FCC agency teams. Swire returned to the White House in 2009 and 2010, serving as Special Assistant to President Obama for Economic Policy, working in the National Economic Council under Lawrence Summers. As a scholar, Swire was lead author in 1998 of “None of Your Business: World Data Flows, Electronic Commerce, and the European Privacy Directive.” He was lead author for two books published in 2012, used by the International Association of Privacy Professionals as the official texts for their global and U.S. certification tests. In addition to these books, Swire has written dozens of scholarly articles on privacy and cybersecurity. He has testified often before the Congress, and been quoted regularly in the press. In addition to his work with public-interest organizations and the government, Swire has served on privacy and security advisory boards for companies including Google, IBM, Intel, and Microsoft, and for eight years was a consultant with the global law firm of Morrison & Foerster, LLP. Swire graduated from Princeton University, summa cum laude, and the Yale Law School, where he was an editor of the Yale Law Journal.