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Susan Landau

Susan Landau works in cybersecurity, privacy, and public policy. A former Sun Microsystems Distinguished Engineer, she has held visiting positions at Harvard, Cornell, and Yale, and has been a faculty member at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and at Wesleyan University, as well as a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study (Harvard University). Landau is a coauthor of Privacy on the Line: The Politics of Wiretapping and Encryption (MIT Press, revised edition 2007) and the author of numerous scientific and policy papers. She is a fellow of the Association of Computing Machinery and the American Association for the Advancement of Science,and was a 2012 Guggenheim Fellow.

Titles by This Author

Surveillance or Security?

The Risks Posed by New Wiretapping Technologies
By Susan Landau

Digital communications are the lifeblood of modern society. We “meet up” online, tweet our reactions millions of times a day, connect through social networking rather than in person. Large portions of business and commerce have moved to the Web, and much of our critical infrastructure, including the electric power grid, is controlled online. This reliance on information systems leaves us highly exposed and vulnerable to cyberattack. Despite this, U.S. law enforcement and national security policy remain firmly focused on wiretapping and surveillance.

Privacy on the Line, Updated And Expanded Edition

The Politics of Wiretapping and Encryption
By Whitfield Diffie and Susan Landau

Telecommunication has never been perfectly secure. The Cold War culture of recording devices in telephone receivers and bugged embassy offices has been succeeded by a post-9/11 world of NSA wiretaps and demands for data retention. Although the 1990s battle for individual and commercial freedom to use cryptography was won, growth in the use of cryptography has been slow. Meanwhile, regulations requiring that the computer and communication industries build spying into their systems for government convenience have increased rapidly.