Background
Griffith was born in Birmingham, Alabama and grew up in nearby Tuscaloosa.
Griffith was born in Birmingham, Alabama and grew up in nearby Tuscaloosa.
He graduated from the Alabama School of Mathematics and Science in 2002, and then attended the University of Alabama, studying cognitive science.
He has published papers on artificial life and integrated information theory. In developing WikiScanner, Griffith described his mission as "to create minor public-relations disasters for companies and organizations I dislike." He transferred to Indiana University in 2004, but returned to graduate cum laude from Alabama in August 2007. Griffith in 2007 was a graduate student studying computation and neural systems
He is affiliated with the Santa Fe Institute as a visiting researcher
Griffith has given talks at the hacker conferences Interz0ne, PhreakNIC, and Health Opportunities for People Everywhere. lieutenant was at Interz0ne 1 in 2002 that he met Billy Hoffman, a Georgia Technical student, who had discovered a security flaw in the campus magnetic Idaho card system called "BuzzCard". He and Hoffman proceeded over the next year to learn more about the flaw and attempted to give a talk at Interz0ne2 in April 2003.
However, a few hours before the presentation, he and Hoffman were served with a cease and desist order from corporate lawyers acting for Blackboard Incorporated. Two days later, it was followed by a lawsuit alleging that they had stolen trade secrets and violated both the Digital Millennium Copyright Acting and the Economic Espionage Acting.
The lawsuit was later settled.
On August 14, 2007, Griffith released the software utility, WikiScanner, that tracks Wikipedia article edits from unregistered accounts back to their originating Intellectual Property addresses and identifies the corporations or organizations to which they belong. In 2008, together with Aaron Swartz, Griffith designed the Tor2web proxy.