Alissa Cooper

Alissa Cooper was the Chief Computer Scientist at the Center for Democracy & Technology. Her work focused on a range of issues including consumer privacy, network neutrality, and technical standards. She conducted research into the inner workings of common and emerging Internet technologies, and sought to explain complex technical concepts in understandable terms. She testified before Congress and the Federal Trade Commission and wrote regularly on a variety of technology policy topics. She currently co-chairs the Geographic Location/Privacy working group (Geopriv) and serves on the Internet Architecture Board (IAB) within the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). She is also a member of the Broadband Internet Technical Advisory Group (BITAG) technical working group and the FCC’s Open Internet Advisory Committee.

Alissa moved to the Washington area after completing her Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in Computer Science at Stanford University. There her work focused on computer security issues and their policy implications.

Publications:

• Alissa Cooper, ed., “RFC 6462, “Report from the Internet Privacy Workshop,” Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), January 2012.
• Alissa Cooper, “Doing the DPI Dance: Assessing the Privacy Impact of Deep Packet Inspection,” in W. Aspray and P. Doty (Eds.), Privacy in America: Interdisciplinary Perspectives, Plymouth, UK: Scarecrow Press, 2011.
• Richard Barnes et al., RFC 6280, “An Architecture for Location and Location Privacy in Internet Applications,”Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), July 2011.
• Alissa Cooper and Ted Hardie, GEOPRIV: Creating Building Blocks for Managing Location Privacy on the Internet, Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) Journal, vol. 5, no. 2, September 2009.
• Jon Peterson and Alissa Cooper, RFC 5594, “Report from the IETF Workshop on Peer-to-Peer (P2P) Infrastructure, May 28, 2008″, Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), July 2009.
• Alissa Cooper and John Morris. Binding privacy rules to location on the web. In Proceedings of the 2nd international Workshop on Location and the Web (Boston, Massachusetts, April 04 – 04, 2009). LOCWEB ’09, vol. 370. ACM, New York, NY, 1-4.
• Alissa Cooper, “A Survey of Query Log Privacy-Enhancing Techniques from a Policy Perspective,” ACM Transactions on the Web (TWEB), vol. 2, issue 4, Oct. 2008
• Testimony of Alissa Cooper before the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, Subcommittee on Telecommunications and the Internet, “What Your Broadband Provider Knows About Your Web Use: Deep Packet Inspection and Communications Laws and Policies,” July 2008
• Marit Hansen, Ari Schwartz, Alissa Cooper, “Privacy and Identity Management,” IEEE Security and Privacy, vol. 6, no. 2, pp. 38-45, Mar/Apr 2008