Susan Landau

Susan Landau is currently a Visiting Scholar in the Computer Science Department at Harvard University. She was previously a Distinguished Engineer at Sun Microsystems, and held faculty positions at the University of Massachusetts and Wesleyan University.

She has worked on security, cryptography, and policy, including surveillance and digital-rights management issues.

Landau is the author of "Surveillance or Security? The Risks Posed by New Wiretapping Technologies" (MIT Press, 2011), coauthor, with Whitfeld Diffie, of "Privacy on the Line: the Politics of Wiretapping and Encryption" (MIT Press, 1998; rev. 2007), and the author of numerous computer science and public policy papers, as well as op-eds on cybersecurity and encryption policy.

She is a member of the National Research Council Computer Science and Telecommunications Board and serves on the advisory committee for the National Science Foundation's Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering.

Landau was a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, is a recipient of the 2008 Women of Vision Social Impact Award, and is a fellow of both the AAAS and the ACM. She received her BA from Princeton, her MS from Cornell, and her PhD from MIT.

Susan has just been awarded a Guggenheim fellowship for 2012.

AusCERT2012 Presentation

Surveillance or Security? The Risks Posed by New Wiretapping Technologies

The United States -- indeed, much of the industrial world -- has moved large portions of business and commerce, including the control of critical infrastructure, onto IP-based networks.  This reliance on information systems leaves nations highly exposed and vulnerable to cyberattack.  At least in the U.S., law enforcement remains focused on building wiretapping systems within communications infrastructure.  In embedding eavesdropping mechanisms into communications technology itself, we are building tools that could easily be turned against us. Indeed, such attacks have already occurred. In a world that has Al-Qaeda, nation-state economic espionage, and Hurricane Katrina, how do we get communications security right?  Though the perspective of this talk will be through a U.S. lens, the lessons are applicable much more broadly.