The time is right for an in-depth conversation on privacy. With technology and social media, there have been so many instances of companies and the government datamining and sharing information perceived as private. Join Professor Alvaro Bedoya at the UNM School of Law for a lecture on Privacy and Civil Rights in the Age of Facebook, Ice and the NSA on April 4 starting at 5:30 p.m. 

Professor Bedoya is the founding director of the Center on Privacy & Technology at Georgetown Law, where he is also a Visiting Professor of Law and Director of the Federal Legislation Clinic. Bedoya is an expert on government surveillance and commercial data collection, with a focus on their impact on immigrants and people of color. 

In 2016, he co-authored The Perpetual Line-Up: Unregulated Police Face Recognition in America, the Center's year-long investigation that revealed that most American adults are enrolled in a police face recognition database, and that those systems likely suffer from race and gender bias. 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, Bedoya served as Chief Counsel to the U.S. Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology and the Law, where he negotiated legislation and conducted oversight on mobile location privacy, biometrics, and NSA transparency. 

In 2009, he co-founded the Esperanza Education Fund, a college scholarship for immigrant students that is blind to applicants' legal status. He currently serves on the Board of Directors of Free Press and previously served on the board of the Hispanic Bar Association of Washington, D.C.

A naturalized citizen born in Lima, Peru and raised in upstate New York, Bedoya is a graduate of Harvard College and Yale Law School, where he received the Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowship for New Americans. He lives in Washington, D.C. with his wife, Sima Zadeh Bedoya, a pediatric psychologist at the National Institutes of Health's National Cancer Institute, and their daughter.

This lecture/symposium series has been established to celebrate and keep alive the legacy of Dennis Chavez, one of New Mexico’s most influential U.S. senators during the mid-20th  Century. Sen. Chavez was a remarkable New Mexican, a populist from the South Valley who served a noteworthy and significant term in the U.S. Senate from 1935 until his death in 1962. He is remembered as pivotal and early advocate of civil rights legislation.

The lecture begins at 5:30 p.m. Pre-Lecture mingle and refreshments begin at 4:45 p.m.

Parking at the event is free in the Law School “L” lot starting at 4 p.m. on the surrounding streets and the adjacent M lot. 

For more information and to register for the event, visit U.S. Senator Dennis Chavez Memorial Lectureship in Law and Civil Rights.