Susan Landau

The House passed the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA), a bill that purports to improve U.S. cybersecurity. In fact, the bill does little to protect us but rather a lot to destroy the privacy of American communications.

The bill allows private entities to share "cyber threat" information...

In the United States v. Antoine Jones, the Supreme Court made an extremely important decision, unanimously determining that installing a GPS-tracking device to a suspect's car constitutes a search and thus requires a warrant. Justice Antonin Scalia delivered the opinion of the court, which narrowly focused on whether there...

The newspaper stories about the Obama administration's opposition to the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect IP Act portray the battle over the bills as a fight between Hollywood and the technology companies. That is rather missing the point. While these bills would...

The Internet has created huge numbers of businesses: Amazon, eBay, Google, Skype to name but a few. These businesses disrupted -- and even displaced -- old businesses: local bookstores, classified ads, newspaper and magazine advertising, long-distance calling -- but you didn't see the bookstores, the print...

Back when telephones were devices that sat on the hallway table or hung on the kitchen wall, people who called you knew where you were; a phone number named a physical location. The phone company knew that the call had been answered, but it had no idea who took the...

The story of journalists hacking into the voice mails of princes, police, celebrities, sports figures, and ordinary people has caught everyone's attention. It's the story of politicians too cozy with the press and police too friendly with the people they're investigating -- all of which meant investigations didn't...

Those of us in the privacy business have heard the riposte -- "Why should I care about privacy? I have nothing to hide." -- more times than we want to count. It's considered impolitic to say, "Well, I happen to know that your Aunt Sally is in prison for murdering...

Last fall, the FBI claimed it was "going dark," unable to wiretap due to changes in communications technology, including peer-to-peer Voice over IP calls and encryption. The House Judiciary Committee held a hearing this spring, but in the absence of hard data, it is hard to know what...

The U.S. government's approach to secure online identities, with its strong emphasis on privacy, is to be applauded. But the devil is in the details. In this case, the details lie with the private sector, whom the administration intends to rely on to provide solutions.

This gets sticky....

Between the mid 1970s and the late 1990s, the government fought industry and academia over cryptography. The National Security Agency (NSA) had been accustomed to being the only one in the ring designing cryptographic systems and decoding messages, and it didn't take nicely to the competition. First NSA...

Last fall the FBI issued an alarm: its wiretapping efforts were "going dark" and soon the bureau would not be able to eavesdrop on criminals. Echoing complaints from India, Dubai, and the United Arab Emirates, the FBI said it needed access to keys used in encrypted messages and...

It's been a long time coming. After any number of heavy-handed approaches to online identity management, the federal government looks like it is trying a more enlightened approach. Last week the White House announced that the Commerce Department will be in charge of developing identity systems for the internet....

Did you ever stop to think what your browsing reveals about you? You check out nearby pizza places, and your browser lets the search engine know your location (bet you didn't know that was happening while you were typing "great anchovy pizza"). Or you look up the evening's baseball scores,...

Some time ago I was on an American Bar Association panel with an FBI Associate Deputy Director when he asked the audience if they knew that Skype puts "other people's data on your machine." He looked appalled. I responded, "Yes, that's what peer-to-peer applications do." Skype encrypts conversations...

What is the FBI thinking? The bureau wants to roll back technology -- peer-to-peer voice communications -- and government regulations on encryption in order to be able to wiretap more easily. But our real security problem doesn't lies in law enforcement's inability to read criminals and terrorist on-line communications....

In the last few days, several news sources have reported on a recent article by the Defense Department's Deputy Under Secretary William Lynn III that revealed that in 2008 malware from an infected flash drive found its way into the U.S. Central Command computer network. This malware, which sought...

The White House wants to make it easier for the FBI to get at your email and web browsing records; the plan is to make transactional information surrounding your Internet
communications --- the to/from information and the times and dates of those communications --- subject to National...

When I was in school, history was about kings and queens, and the common folk were useful for a Bruegel illustration, nothing more. The focus was on those who had power and how they used it, not on those subjected to power. That focus has changed. Now some...