Simson Garfinkel
American security researcher and author whose career runs from Unix handbooks through second-hand hard drives to the confidentiality of the US census.
With Gene Spafford he wrote Practical UNIX Security (1991), one of O'Reilly's most-read titles of the decade, followed shortly by a book on PGP. Database Nation (2000) warned about the privacy cost of the emerging data trade before that trade had a name.
In 2003 he and Abhi Shelat bought 158 used hard drives and found credit card numbers, medical records and email on a large share of them — a simple study that persuaded plenty of people to wipe disks before selling them. Digital forensics became his field, and as a scientist at the US Census Bureau he pushed differential privacy into the 2020 census.