The FTC, which is mainly staffed by lawyers, has beefed up its technological know-how in recent years by hiring computer scientists, such as EdFelten of Princeton, who better understand the complexity of how information is passed around on the Internet.
But in cases where researchers notify companies and offer to cooperate in order to solve security problems, a smarter approach to fixing those flaws has largely prevailed: EdFelten, for instance, a Princeton researcher, faced legal threats in 2003 when he and colleagues exposed security vulnerabilities in Diebold voting machines.