Berkman Luncheon Series >
8
2011
Surveillance or Security? The Risks Posed by New Wiretapping Technologies
Susan Landau, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University & CRCS
Tuesday, March 8, 12:00 pm
Griswold Hall Room 110, Harvard Law School
RSVP required for those
attending in person to Amar Ashar (ashar@cyber.law.harvard.edu)
This
event will be webcast
live
at 12:00 pm ET and archived on our site shortly after.
This talk is part of a lens on privacy and security, which will highlight various talks this semester that focus on issues related to privacy and security in digitally networked environments
The United States has moved
large portions of business and commerce, including the control
of critical infrastructure, onto IP-based networks. This
reliance on information systems leaves the U.S. highly exposed
and vulnerable to cyberattack, yet U.S. law enforcement remains
focused on building wiretapping systems within communications
infrastructure. By embedding eavesdropping mechanisms into
communications technology itself, we build 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?
About Susan
Susan Landau is a fellow at
the Radcliffe Institute for
Advanced Study at Harvard
University for the 2010-2011 academic year. Her book,
Surveillance
or
Security? The Risks Posed by New Wiretapping Technologies
will
be published by MIT Press in February 2011; she is also the
co-author,
with Whitfield Diffie, of the
1998 Privacy
on
the Line: The Politics of Wiretapping and Encryption. From
1999-2010 Landau was at Sun
Microsystems, first as Senior Staff Engineer and then as
Distinguished Engineer. There she concentrated on the interplay
between security and public policy, and she briefed government
officials in both Washington and Europe on such disparate issues
as
security risks in surveillance mechanisms, digital rights
management,
and cryptographic export control. In 2009
she testified
for the House Science Committee
on Cybersecurity
Activities
at NIST's Information Technology Laboratory. Landau is
currently a member of the Commission on Cyber Security for the
44th
Presidency, established by the Center
for
Strategic and and International Studies, and serves on
the
Computer Science and Telecommunications Board of the
National
Research Council and on
the advisory
committee for the National Science
Foundation's Directorate
for
Computer and Information Science and Engineering. Before
joining Sun, Landau was a faculty member at the University of
Massachusetts and Wesleyan University. Landau is the recipient of
the 2008
Women of Vision Social Impact Award, a Fellow of
the American Association for the
Advancement of Science, and
an ACM Distinguished
Engineer.
About the Privacy and Security Lens
In spring 2011, the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University and the Center for Research on Computation and Society (CRCS) at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) will highlight a series of talks that will focus on issues related to privacy and security in digitally networked environments. Events associated with this “lens” will seek to foster discussion and explore novel solutions to digital security and privacy issues, and aim to surface and engage with some of the technological, legal, political, economic, and behavioral tensions at work within these topics. This cross-disciplinary initiative will build on current CRCS and BCIS collaborative efforts, and seek to bring multiple perspectives and approaches to these issues.
Links
Last updated March 08, 2011