Wired has an excellent profile of Chris Soghoian today. I hadn't realized exactly how many battles he's waged and won, and how many successful activist moments he's had. I'd heard of most of them, but didn't know they were all the same guy. It's an incredible variety of work, targeting the TSA, Google, Sprint, Dropbox, Facebook, and AT&T.

I've been following Chris on Twitter since earlier this year, and feel much better informed on the crazy world of online security as a result. Recommended.

What I admire most from the article is that, despite his well-earned adversarial relationship with the government, and his obvious distrust of institutions and their motives, Chris is not a "burn down the system" kind of guy. He worked for the FTC for a while, which is how he got access to record the Sprint exec bragging about handing off information to law enforcement 8 million times -- which cost him his contract renewal. In spite of that:

Soghoian says that under the right circumstances he’d consider another government job—ideally for the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, which advises the White House on matters of individual privacy. It has been inactive since 2008.

“I don’t want security clearance,” he says. “I don’t need a staff. I just want to be an ombudsman, with an office and letterhead and access to lawyers and a fax machine. I know it’ll never happen. They’re not going to want someone who has a track record of speaking truth to power using their soapbox to point out their flaws. But that would be an ideal gig.”

That would be ideal for all of us.