Google’s Salgado ’89 Speaks on Data and Security

Google’s Director for Information Security and Law Enforcement Matters Richard Salgado ’89 joined YLS students over breakfast and lunch on Tuesday, November 8. At the breakfast meeting, students had an opportunity to hear Mr. Salgado’s story, learn more about his career path, and seek advice for how to pursue a career that combines technology and law. Mr. Salgado offered advice on staying open to new opportunities, despite the pressure in law school to plan years in advance.

During the lunchtime talk, Mr. Salgado dove into the substance of his work and discussed the efforts Google has undertaken to be more transparent with how they share user data, how they respond to warrants and requests for information, and how companies can balance a strong desire for privacy with a desire to cooperate with the government on uncovering threats to national security. He detailed Google’s efforts to publish more data about various government requests and talked through the most recent Google Transparency Report.

Salgado has spent his career lecturing and working in the field of cybersecurity and currently serves as a legal lecturer on computer crime and on Internet business legal and policy issues at Stanford Law School. Prior to joining Google, he was with Yahoo!, focusing on international security and compliance work. He also served as senior counsel in the Computer Crime and Intellectual Property Section of the United States Department of Justice. As a federal prosecutor, Salgado specialized in investigating and prosecuting computer network cases, such as computer hacking, illegal computer wiretaps, denial of service attacks, malicious code, and other technology-driven privacy crimes. Salgado graduated magna cum laude from the University of New Mexico and in 1989 received his JD from Yale Law School.

The talks were co-sponsored by the Center for Global Legal Challenges, the Information Society Project, and TechSoc.