Peter Swire

Peter P. Swire is Professor of Law and Ethics and the Elizabeth and Thomas Holder Chair at the Scheller College of Business at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Professor Swire is Associate Director for Policy of the Georgia Tech Institute for Information Security and Privacy. He has appointments by courtesy with the College of Computing and School of Public Policy. He is also Senior Counsel with Alston & Bird, LLP. Professor Swire has been a leading privacy and cyberlaw scholar, government leader, and practitioner since the rise of the Internet in the 1990’s.

In 2018, Swire was named an Andrew Carnegie Fellow for research on "Protecting Human Rights and National Security in the New Era of Data Nationalism." In 2015, the International Association of Privacy Professionals awarded him its Privacy Leadership Award. In 2013, he served as one of five members of President Obama's Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technology. Prior to that, he was co-chair of the global Do Not Track process for the World Wide Web Consortium. He is Senior Fellow with the Future of Privacy Forum and a member of the National Academies' Forum on Cyber-Resiliency.

Under President Clinton, Swire was the Chief Counselor for Privacy, in the U.S. Office of Management and Budget. He was the first person to have U.S. government-wide responsibility for privacy policy. In that role, his activities included being White House coordinator for the HIPAA medical privacy rule, chairing a White House task force on how to update wiretap laws for the Internet age, and helping negotiate the U.S.-E.U. Safe Harbor agreement for trans-border data flows. Under President Obama, he served as Special Assistant to the President for Economic Policy.

Swire is author of six books and numerous scholarly papers. He has testified often before the Congress, and been quoted regularly in the press.