Skip to the main content

Susan Landau

Susan Landau's Homepage

Susan Landau will be spending 2010-2011 as a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Her book ``Surveillance or Security? The Risks Posed by New Wiretapping Technologies'' (MIT Press) will be appearing in spring 2011.

From 1999-2010 Landau was a Distinguished Engineer at Sun Microsystems Laboratories, where she worked on security, cryptography, and policy, including surveillance and digital-rights management issues. She advised government officials in the U.S. and abroad on security risks of various surveillance technologies, helped in the development of privacy and security policies for the Liberty federated identity management system, with Sun's CTO established Sun's innovative stance on digital-rights management, and was instrumental in keeping the control of federal civilian computer security within civilian agencies. Landau is coauthor, with Whitfield Diffie, of ``Privacy on the Line: the Politics of Wiretapping and Encryption'' (MIT Press, original edition: 1998; rev. 2007), and she is the author of numerous computer science and public policy papers, as well as op-eds on cybersecurity and encryption policy for various leading newspapers, including the Washington Post and the Chicago Tribune. She has spoken frequently on these issues for NPR.

Prior to her time at Sun, Landau was a faculty member at the University of Massachusetts and at Wesleyan University. She is a member of the National Research Council Computer Science and Telecommunications Board, serves on the advisory committee for the National Science Foundation's Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering, and on the CSIS Commission on Cyber Security for the 44th Presidency. Landau is a recipient of the 2008 Women of Vision Social Impact Award, a AAAS Fellow, and an ACM Distinguished Engineer. She received her BA from Princeton, her MS from Cornell, and her PhD from MIT.


Publications

Publication
Feb 1, 2016

Don't Panic: Making Progress on the "Going Dark" Debate

This report from the Berkman Center's Berklett Cybersecurity Project offers a new perspective on the "going dark" debate from the discussion, debate, and analyses of an…


Events

Mar 8, 2011 @ 12:00 PM

Surveillance or Security? The Risks Posed by New Wiretapping Technologies

Susan Landau, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University & CRCS

Building surveillance into communications infrastructures? Law enforcement claims it needs wiretaps in order to secure us, but the biggest long-term national-security threat is…

Nov 29, 2010 @ 11:30 AM

CRCS Seminar: Untangling Attribution: Understanding the Requirements Needed for Attribution on the Network

Susan Landau, Radcliffe/CRCS

As a result of increasing spam, DDoS attacks, cybercrime, and data exfiltration from corporate and government sites, there have been multiple calls for an Internet architecture…