Mr. Robot Goes to Washington

Paul Ohm
5 min readAug 9, 2016

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If you are a smart techie hoping to become a bona fide technology policy expert, come work for me at Georgetown Law, in Washington DC. I am hiring a technologist to serve as my full-time research fellow. In this job you will:

  • Conduct cutting-edge research at the intersection of law, technology, and policy, with a special focus on information privacy law.
  • Meet the key people who shape technology policy at the federal, state, and international levels.
  • Learn enough about law and the legal system to be dangerous.

If the fit is right, we will also consider a joint appointment to the staff technologist position with the Center on Privacy and Technology, the law school’s in-house privacy think tank.

I (humbly) think this is one of the best positions in the country for helping shape technology policy and for getting a crash course in how technology policy is made. You should apply for this job if you are:

  • a professional developer inspired (or incensed) by the headlines to want to help people in DC understand technology better;
  • a data scientist with strong opinions about data ethics and the best way to try to build fairness into machine learning systems;
  • a civic hacker interested in encouraging governments to operate more efficiently, fairly, and transparently; or
  • any other person with strong technology skills who wants to make a positive difference in the world.

Who Are You?

I’m a law professor at Georgetown. In addition to being a lawyer, I have decades of training and experience as a computer programmer, and my research focuses on helping the two worlds of law and technology speak to one another.

I have written about the failure of anonymization, the blurring of corporate and government surveillance, the empty promises of big data, the database of ruin, and much more. I have also burned many cycles thinking about how we teach tomorrow’s non-techie lawyers and policymakers how to understand technology deeply and accurately, which often means teaching them how to talk to techies.

I have also worked as a federal prosecutor in the Department of Justice’s computer crime section and as a privacy advisor to the Federal Trade Commission.

You’ll also (most likely) work for the Center on Privacy and Technology at Georgetown Law, a leading voice in many of the most important privacy debates occurring today. Right now, the Center is studying police use of face recognition, the disparate impact of government surveillance on racial and ethnic minorities, and Big Data-style credit evaluation models.

What Will I Be Doing?

You’ll have three primary responsibilities:

  1. You’ll work with me on ground-breaking, original research at the intersection of privacy, law, and technology. You will have opportunities to publish your work in prestigious academic journals and conference proceedings.
  2. You’ll also help me teach law students about technology. At Georgetown, we are teaching law students how to code, how to build apps, how to audit online privacy, and more. Help us break even more new ground in legal education!
  3. You’ll work with the Center on Privacy and Technology to educate policymakers about some of the most urgent and hotly contested privacy issues being debated today.

You’ll also have many opportunities to round out your experience, for example by:

  • Meeting with many of the country’s technology policy leaders.
  • Sitting in on law school classes.
  • Drafting commentary to government proposals.
  • Publishing opinion pieces in outlets like Slate and The Atlantic.

What Qualifications and Experience Do I Need?

The ideal candidate will be really, really smart. More than anything, I am looking for somebody I can bounce ideas off of on a regular basis. You have to be the kind of person who is willing to push back and debate, but also the kind of person who is able to see more than one side to a problem.

You also need to be an experienced computer programmer. Any programming language is as good as any other, although I have a special affinity for people who know some python or R. What matters most is that you can think deeply about how code is created.

Those are the only two mandatory requirements. Everything else on this list would be nice to have but not required.

The best candidates will have a formal degree in computer science (at least a BS, but a MS or Ph.D would be great), professional technical experience, or both.

Top candidates will also be good writers. I’m looking for a techie who loves to play with words almost as much as code and who has had a lot of experience (academically or professionally) writing.

Top candidates will also have expertise in some or all of the following topics: (1) how the Internet works, meaning both a deep understanding of the underlying protocols (e.g. TCP/IP, DNS, BGP) and hands-on experience setting up or exploring the Internet (e.g. packet sniffing, configuring firewalls, analyzing log files, building scrapers); (2) Linux/Unix use and administration; (3) Amazon web services (or equivalent); (4) machine learning; and (5) network security.

Experience teaching and public speaking is a plus.

You must live in or be willing to relocate to Washington, D.C.

I would love it if you held a strong opinion about emacs versus vi, and I won’t even hold it against you if you’re wrong.

What Will I Get Paid?

We’ll pay you less than you’d get working for the tech industry but you’ll still get a decent, enough-to-get-by-in-DC salary that is comparable to a new staff technologist position at a DC-based non-profit. If you’re looking to get rich, this probably isn’t the job for you.

I’m really interested. What do I do next?

Follow the directions here to apply. Send any questions you have to ohm@law.georgetown.edu.

* About the title of this post: I couldn’t resist the Mr. Robot reference, but while people of all political beliefs are welcome, I’d appreciate it if you did not actively try to collapse the global financial system while working for me.

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