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Welcome to Simson Garfinkel's personal web site.

Simson L. Garfinkel serves on the Association for Computing Machinery's U.S. Technology Policy Committee and its Ethics and Plagiarism Committee. He is also a science journalist who has published hundreds of articles in newspapers and magazines, and 17 books. His research interests include data science ethics, digital forensics, personal information management, counterintelligence, and counterterrorism. (Read full bio.)

Recent publications

• Garfinkel, Simson. EMACS turns 50. MIT Technology Review, October 20, 2026.
• Garfinkel, Simson L. Reanimating ELIZA, the world's first chatbot. Science, vol. 392, no. 6804, p. 1249, June 18, 2026. A review of Inventing ELIZA.
• Garfinkel, Simson L., and Eugene H. Spafford. In Memoriam: C.A.R. Hoare. Communications of the ACM, vol. 69, no. 5, pp. 26–28, May 2026.

See my full CV and publication list for more.

Recent tutorials and presentations

Note: talks with the same name may (and frequently do) have different slides.

• 2025-10-30 Five Challenge Problems for AI and Cybersecurity, Computer Security Symposium 2025 in Okayama. Keynote · PowerPoint
• 2024-09-20 Exploring the Limits of Differential Privacy
• 2024-06-03 Driving Innovation from the University to Government and the Enterprise: Tricks, Traps and Techniques
• 2023-12-18 Differential Privacy Theory and Practice. Video

See also my Presentations Archive.

Selected publications

Academic

1. Clark, David D., Simson Garfinkel, and KC Claffy. Differential Privacy, Firm-Level Data, and the Binomial Pathology. IEEE Security & Privacy, January 2025.
2. Garfinkel, Simson. Complete Delete: In Practice, Clicking ‘Delete’ Rarely Deletes. Should It? MIT Case Studies in Social and Ethical Responsibilities of Computing, September 2024.
3. Garfinkel, Simson. Comment to Mulalidhar and Domingo-Ferrer (2023) – Legacy Statistical Disclosure Limitation Techniques Were Not An Option for the 2020 US Census of Population And Housing. Journal of Official Statistics, vol. 39, no. 3, pp. 399–410, 2023.
4. Garfinkel, Simson. Differential Privacy and the 2020 Census. MIT Case Studies in Social and Ethical Responsibilities of Computing, Winter 2022.
5. Abowd, John M., et al. The 2020 Census Disclosure Avoidance System TopDown Algorithm. Harvard Data Science Review, Special Issue 2, 2022.
6. Bowen, Claire McKay, and Simson Garfinkel. The Philosophy of Differential Privacy. Notices of the American Mathematical Society, November 2021.

History of computing, technology, and MIT

1. Garfinkel, Simson. “M.I.T., rah, rah, rah. Technology!” MIT Technology Review, April 22, 2025.
2. Garfinkel, Simson. MIT prepares for nuclear attack. MIT Technology Review, February 25, 2025.
3. Garfinkel, Simson. MIT's (mostly) secret society. MIT Technology Review, December 23, 2024.
4. Garfinkel, Simson. This is MIT and yes, we have bananas. MIT Technology Review, August 27, 2024.
5. Garfinkel, Simson. Editor of The Tech becomes president of MIT. MIT Technology Review, June 25, 2024.
6. Garfinkel, Simson. How Technology Review got its start. MIT Technology Review, January 4, 2024.

Technology policy

• Medsker, Larry, et al. ACM TechBrief: Automated Vehicles. Association for Computing Machinery, 2024.
• Garfinkel, Simson, Ravi Jain, and Arnon Rosenthal. Comments in response to NITRD Request for Information for the Creation of a National Digital Twins R&D Strategy Plan. ACM U.S. Technology Policy Committee, July 18, 2024.

Current projects Software and systems electric-MC (Electric Manuscript Central), a Chrome extension that improves ScholarOne Manuscripts for reviewers and editors, with a clearer interface, manuscript notes, and tools for assigning associate editors. Email Collection Toolkit (ECT), software for collecting, preserving, deduplicating, and searching email archives. It stores messages in standard MBOX files with provenance and integrity checks. Under active development. Cleaning up pull requests and outstanding issues for The Sleuth Kit. Differential Privacy (MIT Press, 2025). Plant-Tracer, a computer vision application for plant movement labs. Teaching Co-teaching Defense Against the Dark Arts (Cybersecurity Edition) at Harvard. Co-teaching AC221, Critical Thinking in Data Science, at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. Co-teaching CSCI E-11, Frontiers in Computer Science, at Harvard Extension School. Academic research An article about DigitalCorpora for a digital forensics journal. You may also be interested in my Future Projects.

Completed projects bulk_extractor 2.0 tcpflow 2.0 Law and Policy for the Quantum Age, Chris Jay Hoofnagle and Simson Garfinkel (Cambridge University Press, 2021). tcpflow, a TCP/IP session reassembler (2006–2014). bulk_extractor, a high-speed feature extractor (2006–2014). Digital Forensics XML (2005–2012). The Forensics Wiki, founder and maintainer (2005–2014). SBook5, a free-format address book for macOS (1991–2006). AFF, the Advanced Forensic Format for storing digital evidence. Agenda, an early conference scheduling app for PalmOS (2001). Print your own notepaper (2003, updated in 2020). Updated MediaWiki BibTeX Extension (2007). NeXTWORLD Magazine (1991–1993). 10 Spring Street, Vineyard Haven, virtual tour (1995). Tools for hiding information in DOCX files and printing their contents (2008).

Resources for students Current Toolset — The tools that I use in my research Open Source Computer Science Books — A good list Mac Resources LaTeX Resources Python Resources Web Resources Windows Resources XML Resources Student Resources SEED: Developing Instructional Laboratories for Computer Security Education

Where to find Simson Garfinkel online @xchatty on X (Twitter) @xchatty@newsie.social on Mastodon simsong on GitHub Articles in MIT Technology Review ACM Digital Library author profile DBLP profile LinkedIn profile Scopus StackExchange csauthors.net (Both my Erdős number and my Dijkstra number are three.) Google Scholar Muck Rack Wikipedia ORCID: 0000-0003-1294-2831 Mendeley BibTeX: Academic · CSO Magazine · Boston Globe · NeXTWORLD · Technology Review · Other

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