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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 and Policy Committee, and on 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 broadly include data science ethics, digital forensics, personal information management, counter-intelligence and counter-terrorism. (Read full bio.)

Recent Publications

• Garfinkel, Simson. 2024. “Complete Delete: In Practice, Clicking ‘Delete’ Rarely Deletes. Should It?” MIT Case Studies in Social and Ethical Responsibilities of Computing, September. https://doi.org/10.21428/2c646de5.26e95ae4.
• 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, 2023, pp.399-410. https://doi.org/10.2478/jos-2023-0018
• Abowd, J., Ashmead, R., Cumings-Menon, R., Garfinkel, S., Heineck, M., Heiss, C., Johns, R., Kifer, D., Leclerc, P., Machanavajjhala, A., Moran, B., Sexton, W., Spence, M., & Zhuravlev, P. (2022). The 2020 Census Disclosure Avoidance System TopDown Algorithm. Harvard Data Science Review, (Special Issue 2). https://doi.org/10.1162/99608f92.529e3cb9
• Larry Medsker, Philip Koopman, Homa Alemzadeh, Simson Garfinkel, Andrew Grosso, Carl Landwehr, Sam Liles, John Murray, Cristina Nita-Rotaru, William Widen, and Alec Yasinsac. 2024. ACM TechBrief: Automated Vehicles. Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA.
• Garfinkel, S. How Technology Review got its start, Technology Review, January 4, 2024
• Garfinkel, Simson, Rvi Jain, and Aron Rosenthal, Comments in response to NITRD Request for Information for the Creation of a National Digital Twins R&D Strategy Plan, Association for Computing Machinery US Technology Policy Committee, July 18, 2024.

Recent tutorials and presentations

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

• 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.

Recent Notable publications

Academic:

1. Clark, David. D, Simson Garfinkel, and KC Claffy, Differential Privacy, Firm-Level Data, and the Binomial Pathology, IEEE Security and Privacy, January 2025.
2. Garfinkel, Simson. 2024. “Complete Delete: In Practice, Clicking ‘Delete’ Rarely Deletes. Should It?” MIT Case Studies in Social and Ethical Responsibilities of Computing, September. https://doi.org/10.21428/2c646de5.26e95ae4.
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, 2023, pp.399-410. https://doi.org/10.2478/jos-2023-0018
4. Garfinkel, Simson. Differential Privacy and the 2020 Census, MIT Schwarzman College of Computing Case Studies in Social and Ethical Responsibilities of Computing, Winter 2022.
5. Bowen, Claire McKay and Simson Garfinkel, The Philosophy of Differential Privacy, AMS Notices, November 2021.

History of Computing, Technology and MIT:

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

Current projects Software and systems Cleaning up the Sleuth Kit Github site Pull Requests and outstanding Issues. Differential Privacy (MIT Press 2025) Plant-Tracer, a computer vision application for plant movement labs. Teaching Co-Teaching Defense of the Dark Arts (Cybersecurity Edition) at Harvard. Co-Teaching AC221 Critical Thinking in Data Science at Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences Co-Teaching CSCI E-11, Frontiers in Computer Science at Harvard Extension Academic Research Article on https://digitalcorpora.org/ for a 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, Hoofnagle & 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 BibText Extension (2007) NeXTWORLD Magazine (1991--1993) 10 Spring Street, Vineyard Haven, Virtual Tour (1995) docx_steg 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 Twitter @xchatty@newsie.social on Mastodon simsong on GitHub Articles in Technology Review ACM Digital Library Author Profile Or just click: Official ACM Publications DBLP Profile LinkedIn Profile Scopus StackExchange csauthors.net (Both my Erdös number and my Dijkstra numbers are three.) Google Scholar Muckrack Wikipedia Article on Simson Garfinkel Amazon.com Listmania! Lists ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1294-2831 Mendeley BibTeX: Garfinkel Academic CSO Magazine Boston Globe NeXTWORLD Technology Review Other