Simson Garfinkel is an Associate Professor at the Naval Postgraduate School. Based in Arlington VA, Garfinkel's research interests include digital forensics, usable security, data fusion, information policy, and terrorism. He holds seven US patents and has published dozens of research articles on security and digital forensics. He is an ACM Fellow and an IEEE Senior Member, as well as a member of the National Association of Science Writers.
Garfinkel is the author of 14 books on computing. He is perhaps best known for his book Database Nation: The Death of Privacy in the 21st Century. Garfinkel's most successful book, Practical UNIX and Internet Security (co-authored with Gene Spafford), has sold more than 250,000 copies and been translated into many languages since the first edition in 1991.
Garfinkel is also a journalist and has written more than a thousand articles about science, technology, and technology policy. He has won numerous journalism awards, including the Jesse H. Neal National Business Journalism Award for his Machine shop series in CSO magazine. Today he writes for Technology Review Magazine and their website.
As an entrepreneur, Garfinkel founded five companies, including Vineyard, which provided Internet service on Martha's Vineyard from 1995-2005, and Sandstorm Enterprises, an early developer of commercial computer forensic tools.
Garfinkel received three Bachelor of Science degrees from MIT in 1987, a Master's of Science in Journalism from Columbia University in 1988, and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from MIT in 2005.
