David Holtzman Founder, President GlobalPOV Herndon, Virginia

In many ways, David Holtzman’s life experiences have made him especially qualified to truly understand both the implications and effects of technology on our culture and society. During the Dot Com Boom of the late 1990s, Holtzman ran one of the most critical networks in the world—the domain name system. As Chief Technology Officer of Network Solutions and the manager of the Internet's master root server, Holtzman oversaw the growth of the commercial Internet from five hundred thousand to over twenty million domain names.

Early in his technology career Holtzman was a cryptographic analyst, Russian linguist, and submariner with the U.S. Naval Security Group. He worked at the Defense Special Missile and Astronautics Center as an intelligence analyst, focusing chiefly on the Soviet Manned Space program. As chief scientist at IBM's Internet Information Technology group, Holtzman managed the development of IBM's information product and service offering to encrypt and sell digitized content across the Internet, which was called cryptolopes. He served as a senior analyst for Booz|Allen|Hamilton for several years, where he ran technology-driven restructuring initiatives for Wall Street firms and large financial institutions. He also designed and built a networked, heterogeneous database and text retrieval system called Minerva, which was used by NATO and several trade associations before being sold to IBM in 1994.

Holtzman has designed and built numerous information-based software systems and is the author of several major patents. Mr. Holtzman was CEO and chairman of Opion, a venture-backed start-up company he founded in 2000. While there, he developed and patented innovative marketing intelligence technology. He has consulted on marketing strategy for several large corporations, including Amazon.com. He has been a security consultant for several organizations, private and public, including Wesley Clark’s 2004 presidential campaign. He has been an advisor to over a dozen high-tech companies throughout North America. He has taught business courses as an adjunct associate MBA professor at American University in Washington, D.C., and entrepreneurship via a cutting edge “Lecture On Demand” technique for the University of Pittsburgh using distance learning software and podcasts.

In addition to being the author of “Privacy Lost: How Technology is Endangering Your Privacy” (Jossey-Bass, 2006) and consulting, Holtzman is currently the president of GlobalPOV, a firm he founded to explore significant technology issues and their affects on society, and Chief Technology Officer of Pseuds, Inc. He has been interviewed by major news media including the New York Times, CNN, and USA Today. Holtzman wrote a monthly ethics and privacy column called "Flashpoint" for CSO [Chief Security Officer] Magazine, and his essays have been published in BusinessWeek, Wired Magazine, CNET, and ZDNet.. Holtzman publishes daily on topics such as privacy, intellectual property, business, and pop culture on his blog: www.globalpov.com.

Holtzman has a B.S. in Computer Science from the University of Maryland and a B.A. in Philosophy from the University of Pittsburgh. He is the father of five children, whom he raised as a single parent. He likes to sail, watch Shakespearean plays, and cook.

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