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FTC Hires Hacker to Help With Privacy Issues. It Didn’t Last.

Posted on November 17, 2010July 3, 2025 by Dissent

Kashmir Hill writes:

Chris Soghoian is an unlikely federal official. In 2006 he built a tool that let you print fake boarding passes for Northwest Airlines to highlight a TSA security flaw. Unamused, the FBI raided his house (he was never charged with a crime). A year later he mapped where California company Biofilm shipped tubes of its sexual lubricant Astroglide using data the company put online. He claimed Biofilm violated privacy laws, but authorities declined to investigate, saying no financial data was exposed. “Just names, phone numbers, addresses and the fact that you requested sex lube,” grumps Soghoian.*

Given this history, he was surprised when the Federal Trade Commission offered him a job in 2009.

Read more on Forbes.

*The Astroglide/Biofilm breach was the breach that I considered to be the worst breach of 2007 because the company did not notify anyone despite the potential embarrassment to those who were exposed online as having ordered the product and no state or federal data breach laws cover this type of breach.

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