Bennett Haselton

Bennett Haselton (born November 20, 1978) is the founder of Circumventor.com and Peacefire.org, two US-based websites dedicated to combating Internet censorship. Peacefire.org is focused on documenting flaws in commercial Internet blocking programs. Circumventor.com is dedicated to distributing anti-censorship tools to users in countries such as China and Iran, and as of 2011 has over 3 million subscribers through distribution channels including email and Facebook pages.

Haselton has appeared on CNN and The Montel Williams Show to discuss First Amendment issues and been quoted in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Seattle Times, and The Village Voice. and as an expert witness for the ACLU.

He is the Guinness World Record holder for the most country capitals named in 60 seconds in response to a prompt of a random country name, achieving the first verified perfect score on December 12, 2015.

He listed in the Google Vulnerability Program Hall Of Fame for finding and fixing security holes in Google products.

Early life and education Haselton was born in Oklahoma. Haselton lived in England and Denmark and graduated from Copenhagen International School. At 15, Haselton became a member of the Danish National Math Team. Haselton earned a master's degree in mathematics from Vanderbilt University. however Haselton disputes this

PeaceFire

Haselton started PeaceFire in August 1996 to educate young people about the now-defunct 1996 Online Communications Decency Act. threatening to block all of their hosted sites if they continued to host PeaceFire. Two years later in October 1998

Blacklists In 2003, Haselton found out that the PeaceFire.org domain had been placed on a blacklist by the Mail Abuse Prevention System (MAPS) list because of complaints that his ISP, Media3 Technologies, refused to cut off service to companies suspected of "doing business with spammers." It took Haselton over a year to get off the MAPS list. Haselton earned a $15,000 bounty from Netscape in 2001 for uncovering holes in the company's browser software.

Anti-spam activities Haselton has won 10 small-claims cases and thousands of dollars in judgments against senders of unwanted e-mail.

Testimony At 21, Haselton testified before the commission mandated by the Child Online Protection Act, where he presented evidence that the error rate in most commercial blocking programs was much higher than commonly believed. In 2007, he testified as an expert witness for the American Civil Liberties Union of Washington, in the ACLU's lawsuit against the North Central Regional Library District, where a filter was enforced on library computers for all patrons including adults. Haselton's tests showed that sites which the library filter had blocked as "pornography" included a church, an immigration rights group, and the Seattle Women's Jazz Orchestra, and overall that about one in four .org sites blocked by the library filter was blocked in error.