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Former history major Matthew Guariglia '12 is a historian of American policing and a senior policy analyst at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, where he focuses on surveillance, privacy, and AI.

Tell us a little about your position.

In 2019 I finished a Ph.D. in American history where my research was interested in the deep roots of how and why American police use technology in the way they do. Since then, I have served as a senior policy analyst focusing on issues related to surveillance, privacy and AI at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, one of the United States' oldest and biggest civil liberties organizations that specializes specifically in technology policy. There, I advocate for legislation at the local, state and federal level; I investigate what type of technologies the government is using; and I track and analyze emerging technologies for their impact on civil rights. I am also a visiting scholar and occasional visiting professor at Emory University in Atlanta, where I have been teaching a class at the intersection of U.S. political history and the history of technology called “Information and Power.” And finally, I am an author and writer with a few books out and a few more on the way.  

Most recently, I co-edited and introduced a 50th anniversary edition of the Church Committee Report (W.W. Norton, 2026), the 1975 bombshell U.S. Senate investigation into abuses by the FBI and CIA, and in 2023 my first book, Police and the Empire City: Race and the Origins of Modern Policing in New York, was published by Duke University Press. 

What was your Dickinson experience like?

At Dickinson I dove into history, art history, and social science courses with classes like History of American Radicalism, Philosophy of Art, historical methodology, the Cuba Mosaic and Rise and Fall of Apartheid having a profound impact on me. I very much appreciated Dickinson’s educational and general political landscape that emphasized internationalism and environmentalism. It meant that things we were learning about in the classroom directly helped you to understand the things we were reading about in the news every day. 

I also spent far too much of my time driving to concerts, protests and plays in Washington, Baltimore, New York and Philadelphia and participating in extracurricular activities, especially the alternative magazine, the square, where I was editor-in-chief for a number of years. 

How did Dickinson help prepare you for where you are today?

My ability to think critically about the past and how it contorts our current world was cultivated both at Dickinson and while studying abroad in Norwich. Those professors motivated and encouraged me to apply to graduate school. During my continuing education, both at New York University and then at University of Connecticut, I never stopped working in journalism. Writing for the public became an essential survival skill and side gig that was made possible by late nights editing the square. As a history major, I also had the ability to do an independent study in the form of a running blog on the FBI and civil liberties in the 20th century—a project that allowed me to encounter a lot of texts, concepts, and skills that I still rely on and reference to this day.  

Published April 17, 2026