Alvaro Bedoya is the Founding Director of the Center on Privacy & Technology at Georgetown Law, where he is also a Visiting Professor of Law. He established the Privacy Center in 2014 with a focus on exposing and countering the “the color of surveillance” – surveillance’s disparate impact on people of color, immigrants, and other historically marginalized people. In 2016, he co-authored The Perpetual Line-Up: Unregulated Police Face Recognition in America, a year-long investigation that revealed that most American adults are enrolled in a police face recognition network, and that vendor companies were doing little to address the race and gender bias endemic to face scanning software. Alvaro is also the creator of the Immigrant Surveillance Working Group, a coalition of digital and immigrant rights organizations. He has testified before Congress and state legislatures, and his writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic and Slate. Before founding the Center, Alvaro served as Chief Counsel of the U.S. Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology and the Law, where he conducted oversight on mobile location privacy and biometrics, and drafted portions of the 2015 NSA reform legislation, the USA FREEDOM Act. In 2009, he co-founded the Esperanza Education Fund, an immigration status-blind college scholarship for immigrant students that has awarded over $1 million to high school seniors in the District of Columbia, Maryland, and Virginia. A naturalized citizen born in Peru and raised in upstate New York, Alvaro graduated summa cum laude from Harvard College and holds a JD from Yale Law School, where he served on the Yale Law Journal and received the Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowship for New Americans. You can follow Alvaro on Twitter at @alvarombedoya.
Learn more about Alvaro
- Georgetown Law (external)
