On Tardigrades
One day in late July 2014, I recruited my co-counsels and law clerks on the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Privacy to help me move my office to Georgetown Law. We headed to the offices of the new Center on Privacy & Technology, where I was to be its first executive director — and only employee.
I’m good at collecting papers, not recycling them. In the D.C. heat, the short walk was more of a swim. We arrived at McDonough Hall and took the elevator to the fourth floor. But we couldn’t find the office. Finally, turning a few corners, we came across a small windowless space shared with the Center on Poverty & Inequality’s Indi Dutta-Gupta. Indi welcomed us warmly, but my colleagues kept staring at the tight space and bare desk, not even a computer or phone.
Strolling back out to Hart, my co-counsel Josh Riley smiled and patted me on the back. “So, ah, what you’re telling us is that the Center on Privacy & Technology has neither privacy… nor technology?”
It’s been more than seven years since that day. Now, the Center holds a suite of offices on the 6th floor of Georgetown University’s newly renovated Tech & Society hub at 500 First St. NW. The walls are covered in art and press clips, and the shelves lined with privacy books, technical manuals, and poetry.
What I am proudest of, however, is that the Center is no longer “me.”
It hasn’t been for a while. In the fall of 2014, we hired Katie Evans part-time. A Minnesotan through and through, Katie was a quiet force who had gotten her start in local television, detoured to Central European University in Budapest to study politics and learn Hungarian, and slowly built my mash of Dropbox folders into a research and advocacy institution — all while politely declining to take credit for it.
The next fall, we hired Clare Garvie, a fellow upstate New Yorker commended to us by Laura Donohue. Her first assignment? Figure out what is going on with police face recognition. Clare came up with a list of over 100 police departments and DMVs to FOIA. A few weeks later, Clare and I sat nervously in David Vladeck’s office to get his take on the project. With his trademark combination of clear-eyed feedback and infectious enthusiasm, David told us that we were insane (“What about starting with 20?”), but that by all means we should proceed.
Our first technologist, Jonathan Frankle, joined soon after. As DMVs and police departments rained PDFs down on Clare two cubicles over (new office!), Jonathan clicked through the scientific literature on face recognition. He noticed that experts had for years been warning of performance differentials across race, gender, and age. Yet, when he called the major algorithm providers and respectfully insisted on speaking with their engineers, most quickly acknowledged doing little to address it.
Thus, The Perpetual Line-Up was born, the first of what will soon be five Center reports on police face recognition — and, I would submit, a key impetus in a society-wide reckoning of law enforcement’s use of the technology.
Then came Laura Moy and Harrison Rudolph. Laura helped us transition from an informal group of three or four researchers into a true organization, with processes and principles. Harrison would be our first full-time staffer on immigrant surveillance; together, he and Laura helped uncover serious issues in the rollout of biometric face scans at U.S. airports — a report that paved the way for the nation’s first bias testing provision for a federal machine learning-based system, a little-recognized provision tucked away in the FAA Reauthorization Act of 2018.
But it wasn’t just them! Gabrielle Rejouis joined us and was one of the first to raise alarms about the proliferation of workplace tracking. Jameson Spivack laser-focused on his home state of Maryland, making sure that legislators heard the stories of those harmed by the technologies often hailed as panaceas. Poring through documents and presentations, Nina Wang made critical discoveries about the relationship between utility companies, data brokers, and immigration enforcement.
And then there’s Emily Tucker, who first represented the Center through Georgetown Law’s Federal Legislation Clinic and then became our director of research and advocacy. In those roles, she built a partnership with CASA, which ultimately led to the passage of the Maryland Driver Privacy Act. I could not be more pleased that Emily is the Center’s leader and executive director, or that Katie is now our deputy director.
When the pandemic hit a little over two years ago, I was looking for ways to communicate to our staff that things would be rough, but we would get through it. I landed on the tardigrade, a microscopic animal that enters this world at 1/20th of a millimeter — and yet can survive the heat of boiling water, cold just 0.05 kelvins above absolute zero, and even “the burning ultraviolet radiation of space.” The tardigrade achieves this by entering a “tun” state — stopping all biological processes other than those necessary for life.
We would enter tun, I told our staff. We would tend to our families, our kids, ourselves. We’d drop the little stuff, the middle stuff, and focus on the absolute necessities.
On reflection, I think the tardigrade metaphor is apt in another way. The tardigrade is a humble professional. It thrives largely outside of public view. It is modest; after scientists subject it to 40,000 kilopascals of pressure, it does not come out of the other side shining neon and flexing its legs. It just gets back to work — and what it does is profoundly special.
I would like to think that that is the kind of place that we have built. A place that seeks out and identifies the quiet needs that have yet to hit the front pages, appreciates their urgency and severity, and works, heads down, to address them. I am proud of that.
The list of people I need to thank is long.
Right near the top would be Dean Bill Treanor and former Vice Dean Jane Aiken, who took a bet on a 32-year-old Hill staffer who thought he knew something about privacy. David Vladeck, who sat across from me at a coffee shop close to a decade ago and said, “You know, we just might have something for you” — not realizing that he was signing up to eight years of meetings where Center staff arrive at his office confused and leave with purpose and clarity. Our faculty directors, Anupam Chander, Julie Cohen, Laura Donohue, Laura Moy, Paul Ohm, and Angela Campbell, who inspire us with their ideas. The countless staff at Georgetown Law who can be counted on to get the job done. And, of course, our students — who have represented the Center in courts and legislatures, researched and proofed our reports, and who have slowly become alumni, colleagues, and friends.
Thank you all, so very much.
Alvaro Bedoya was the Founding Director of the Center on Privacy & Technology. In April 2022, Bedoya left the Center to serve as a Commissioner on the Federal Trade Commission.
