Peter Eckersley Obituary

We are saddened to announce the death of Peter Daniel Eckersley, an Australian computer scientist, computer security researcher, and activist whose death occured on Sept. 2 at age 43.

Eckersley’s death was announced by one of his former colleagues, Seth Schoen;

I’m devastated to report that Peter Eckersley […], one of the original founders of Let’s Encrypt, died earlier this evening [2022-09-02] at CPMC Davies Hospital in San Francisco.

Peter was the leader of EFF’s contributions to Let’s Encrypt and ACME over the course of several years during which these technologies turned from a wild idea into an important part of Internet infrastructure. […] You can find a very abbreviated version of this history in the Let’s Encrypt paper, to which Peter and I both contributed.

Eckersley was prominent in internet privacy and was openly critical of web tracking technologies and companies that use them.

In 2007, he criticised Facebook for their lack of transparency in user tracking services as well as the use by internet service providers of deep packet inspection of peer-to-peer networks to seek out copyright infringement, often relying purely on IP addresses to identify users in court.

His later work in this field resulted in the Panopticlick, an EFF website to test the identifiability of users’ web browsers, as well as advocacy for stronger enforcement of the Do Not Track header.

Eckersley was outspoken against the centralization of cloud hosting providers, particularly that of AWS, fearing that cloud providers could be compelled to look into users’ data, plausibly allowing a government agency to bypass the protections afforded by the Fifth Amendment of the United States Constitution, such as was later seen in PRISM.

In 2021, he co-founded the non-profit AI Objectives Institute, conceived to interrogate the values and politics around artificial intelligence.

He also was a visiting senior fellow at OpenAI.

Eckersley’s research and policy work focused on applications including predictive policing, autonomous vehicles, cybersecurity, and military uses of artificial intelligence.