Barry Steinhardt served as Associate Director of the American Civil Liberties Union between 1992 and 2002. He has been Director of the ACLU's Program on Technology and Liberty, since 2002.

Steinhardt has advocated for privacy and information technology issues tirelessly, speaking to audiences ranging from the National Conference of State Legislatures, to the National Commission on the Future of DNA Evidence, to the annual conference of the World’s Privacy Commissions. He has written on privacy issues and free expression issues in a variety of periodicals ranging from USA Today, to CIO Magazine, to the journal of the Davos World Economic Forum.

Steinhardt is a frequent guest on news and talk programs and has appeared on such programs as the Today Show, CNN's Crossfire, CBS's Face the Nation and Morning News,.

Steinhardt was chair of the 2003 Computer Freedom and Privacy Conference (CFP). He has served on a wide variety of panels and Boards, including the Department of Transportation’s Negotiated Rule Making on national driver’s license standards, the Advisory Committee to the US Census , the Blue Ribbon Panel on Genetics of the National Conference of State Legislatures and the Advisory Board to Privacy international. He also was selected to be a member of the US delegation to the G-8 Government and Private Sector Tokyo conference on Cyber Crime and served as an advisor to the Czech Helsinki Committee.

In 1998, Steinhardt took a leave of absence from the ACLU to serve as President of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

As Associate Director, Steinhardt was responsible for providing structural and managerial assistance to the ACLU's 51 affiliates and oversaw the ACLU's offices in Puerto Rico, the Dakotas and Wyoming. Steinhardt previously served as Executive Director of the Vermont and Pennsylvania Affiliates of the ACLU.

Steinhardt is a 1978 graduate of the Northeastern University School of Law.

Blog Entries by Barry Steinhardt

You Are Being Watched!

Posted January 12, 2009 | 12:40 PM (EST)


You are being watched! Once that might have just been the ravings of a paranoid, but increasingly it’s all too true. More and more of the public spaces in America are being plastered by video surveillance cameras — and increasingly, the “they” behind those cameras is not a disconnected collection...

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"Terrorist" Watch List Hits One Million Names

Posted July 14, 2008 | 12:30 PM (EST)


The "terrorist" watch list now has more than one million names. Do you feel safer now?

Since February we've been tracking the size of our government's list of ostensible terrorist suspects, which according to the government's own report (pdf) has been rising at a...

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Absurd Watch List Bloat Hurts Everyone

Posted February 26, 2008 | 03:43 PM (EST)


There are 917,000 terrorists lurking in our midst, poised and ready to attack America! By July, we will have identified over 1 million!

As absurd as that claim seems, it is the very premise of the terrorist watch list compiled and used by the US government to determine who...

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A Midnight of Lost Privacy

Posted September 17, 2007 | 09:28 AM (EST)


What's happening to America? We are fast approaching a total surveillance society - a "midnight" of lost privacy. And it's only six minutes before the hour.

2007-09-14-surveillance.jpg

How is this happening? First there's the technology. We've got RFID tags, biometrics,...

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