Stanford CIS
Brian Pascal

Brian Pascal

Non-Residential Fellow

Brian’s work encompasses a variety of disciplines at the intersection of privacy, security, science, and technology, including civil liberties, privacy, big data, digital ethics, and how the law adapts over time to scientific and technology advances. His research focuses on the challenge of integrating both new and established scientific thought into legal and political practice. He also studies the application of big data and machine learning to complex social problems.Brian has served in a variety of roles at the interface of technology, law, policy, and business. He currently works as a policy advisor to the Santa Clara County Board of Supervisors on surveillance, data privacy and security, criminal justice, and public safety. He has also spent time as an academic researcher, an independent privacy and security consultant, a civil liberties engineer with Palantir Technologies, a cybersecurity and privacy consultant with IBM, and an attorney with the firm of Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati. Brian received his law degree from the University of Michigan Law School, his undergraduate degree in physics from Duke University, and in between he studied science writing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Recent articles

Blog

Big Data and the Perceptual Divide

There's an old joke that goes like this: “There are only 10 types of people in the world: those who understand binary and those who don't.” Like most ol…

Publication

How Technology Broke Privacy

One of the greatest challenges of living in the future is that it mostly looks just like the present. We have self-driving cars, commercial spaceflight, powerfu…