- PrivacyWonk

Tim Lisko

About My name is Tim Lisko; I am a policy wonk and IT security geek. My background is varied. I started my professional life as a true geek; unix system administration, security, some light coding, and forensics. My first legitimate high school job was at an Internet Service Provider outside of Philadelphia (now defunct, not my fault). I began by fielding tech support phone calls and quickly moved into data center infrastructure administration, network operations, and other tasks that a 16 year old normally shouldn’t have had an opportunity to perform.

As I entered college, I thought I had found my calling with computer geekery and enrolled into a computer science degree. However, I remember sitting in a data structures class my sophomore year and having two realizations: 1) the degree wasn’t exciting me anymore and 2) that I had burned out on the whole scene. I searched for another passion in my life and found politics, especially foreign policy. I enrolled into a political science major and found my new form of geekery, I became a policy wonk.

I graduated with a very odd skill set for which I did not see an immediate and direct translation into a career path; a degree in political science, a deep functional knowledge of IT, and an unending curiosity about both. After some unproductive searching, I reached out through friends in the consulting world and soon found out that my background – a technologist who understood policy, a geek who could talk to non-geeks – was in fact in demand.

So I landed a job at a consulting firm in DC (now defunct, not my fault) performing IT security activities. Through that job, I found the privacy world and the perfect intersection of interests. I made the switch. Instead of protecting only the system, I started to care about the system and the information – how the information would be used, secured, shared, and stored.

Privacy means something to everyone. From the Supreme Court to the average citizen, everyone has an opinion.

This blog is my opinion on privacy and will cover everything from news and legislation to breaches and security.

Below is the public key for timothy.lisko@privacywonk.net: