Susan Landau
Distinguished Engineer, Sun Microsystems Laboratories

National Security on the Line

March 27, 2006
2:05pm-3:20pm
Room 142, Computer Science Research Bldg.

Abstract:

Wiretaps have been used since the invention of the telegraph and have been a legal element of the U.S. law-enforcement arsenal for over a quarter century. In 1994, in keeping with law enforcement's efforts to have laws stay current with changing technologies, Congress passed the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA). This controversial law, which mandated that digitally-switched telephone networks must be built wiretap compatible, was not easily implemented. Now the FBI is seeking to extend CALEA to Voice over IP (VoIP). Such an application is less than straightforward and in the current communications environment, with an unsecured Internet upon which critical infrastructure depending heavily, building surveillance technology directly into Internet protocols may have very negative national-security implications. This talk discusses wiretapping, the Internet, communications security, and national-security needs in this communications environment.

Susan Landau is Distinguished Engineer at Sun Microsystems Laboratories, where she concentrates on the interplay between security and public policy. She is currently working on digital rights management and helped establish Sun's stance on DRM. Her earlier activities included work on cryptography and export control.

Before joining Sun, Landau was a faculty member at the University of Massachusetts and Wesleyan University, and held visiting positions at Yale, Cornell, and the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute at Berkeley. She and Whitfield Diffie have written ``Privacy on the Line: The Politics of Wiretapping and Encryption,'' which won 1998 Donald McGannon Communication Policy Research Award, and the 1999 IEEE-USA Award for Distinguished Literary Contributions Furthering Public Understanding of the Profession. Landau is also primary author of the 1994 Association for Computing Machinery report ``Codes, Keys, and Conflicts: Issues in US Crypto Policy.'' Prior to her work in policy, Landau did research in symbolic computation and algebraic algorithms, discovering several polynomial-time algorithms for problems that previously only had exponential-time solutions.

Landau is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. She is a member of the National Institute of Standards and Technology's Information Security and Privacy Advisory Board, a member of the editorial board of IEEE Security and Privacy, as well as a member of the Computing Research Association Committee on the Status of Women in Computing Research. She has been a member of the Association for Computing Machinery's Advisory Committee on Privacy and Security and ACM's Committee on Law and Computing Technology as well as an associate editor of the Notices of American Mathematical Society. She has appeared on NPR several times, and has had articles published in the ``Boston Globe,'' ``Chicago Tribune,'' ``Christian Science Monitor,'' ``Scientific American,'' as well as numerous scientific journals. Landau received her PhD from MIT (1983), her MS from Cornell (1979), and her BA from Princeton (1976).