Adrienne Fowler on “Lessons Learned from Ashley Madison and other High Profile Breaches”

On March 3, 2016, Adrienne Fowler moderated a panel in Washington, DC at the Federal Communications Bar Associations’ Eleventh Annual Privacy & Data Security Symposium. Ms. Fowler led a discussion among four leading attorneys in the field of data security law: Neil Chilson, Attorney Advisor to FTC Commissioner Maureen Ohlhausen; Colleen Brown, Partner, Sidley Austin, LLP; Ross Schulman, Co-Director, New America’s Cybersecurity Initiative and Senior Policy Counsel, New America’s Open Technology Institute; and Michael Stawasz, Deputy Chief of Computer Crime, Criminal Division, U.S. Department of Justice.  She explored how the high-profile breaches of 2015 demonstrate the increasing diversity in the types of data breaches, and what this increased diversity means for companies trying to prevent data breach; how to approach data breach prevention and mitigation in an era of Big Data; evolving concepts of what constitutes legally actionable harm in the data breach context; and how to effectively involve law enforcement as part of data breach response.

Adrienne Fowler is an attorney at Harris, Wiltshire & Grannis in Washington, D.C., where she specializes in communications, privacy, and consumer protection law and compliance.