What do you get when you spend your academic career exposing broken DRM schemes, suing the recording industry when they try to silence you, showing the insecurity of e-voting machines, filing DMCA exemption requests, and freeing US court documents from behind their paywall? You get to be the first-ever Chief Technologist at the Federal Trade Commission.

Princeton computer science professor Ed Felten today was tapped for a one-year stint at the FTC in a decision so shockingly sane that it's still a bit hard to believe. Felten has a terrific reputation as both a researcher and advocate, someone with deep technical knowledge, a pro-consumer/pro-openness/pro-tinkering bias, and an aversion to posturing and zealotry.

In the last decade alone, Felten and his students and Princeton's Center For Information Technology Policy have broken the music industry's SDMI encryption scheme, filed a lawsuit against the RIAA, joined the Electronic Frontier Foundation board, and showed us all how to break a badly secured e-voting machine in under one minute. They also manage to run the popular "Freedom To Tinker" blog.

In 2009, we called him one of our "people to watch" in tech policy, and we're quite sure this put him over the top for the FTC post. (Kidding!)

According to FTC Chair Jon Leibowitz, Felten will "provide invaluable input into the recommendations we’ll be making soon for online privacy, as well as the enforcement actions we’ll soon bring to protect consumer privacy. We’re thrilled to have him on board."