Susan Landau

Susan Landau is currently completing a book on security risks of building surveillance into communications infrastructures. She was until recently a Distinguished Engineer at Sun Microsystems , where she concentrated on the interplay between security and public policy. She is currently working on wiretap and surveillance issues. Her earlier work included digital rights management, where she helped establish Sun's stance on DRM, security, privacy, and identity management, and cryptography and export control issues.

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 (original edition: 1998; updated and expanded edition: 2007). Landau participated in the 2006 ITAA study on the security risks of applying the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act to Voice over IP, and 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 the recipient of the 2008 Women of Vision Social Impact Award, a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and a Distinguished Engineer of the Association for Computing Machinery. She served for six years on the National Institute of Standards and Technology's Information Security and Privacy Advisory Board, and is currently on the editorial board of IEEE Security and Privacy and the Communications of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), as well as on the Computing Research Association Committee on the Status of Women in Computing Research. She has been a member of ACM'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 ``Washington Post,'' ``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).