On 24 September at 14.30 at the Aula Magna of Politecnico di Milano, Tech and Law Center is pleased to have as a guest Susan Landau with a talk on “Surveillance or Security? The Risks Posed by New Wiretapping Technology”. During the event, Susan Landau will present some of the issues raised in her recent publication on the subject of electronic surveillance, highlighting the interplay between privacy, cybersecurity and public policy. The new technologies of electronic surveillance, in fact, not only collide with the issue of privacy, but also with that of security, that is increasingly being penalized by the policies of “control” developed at national and international level. The results of her studies also demonstrate how wiretapping has, in terms of cost / benefit, limited efficacy and how encryption is not a real solution to protect users’ privacy. These and other interesting ideas will form the basis for the following debate coordinated by Stefano Zanero, Francesca Bosco and Giuseppe Vaciago.
Susan Landau is a Visiting Scholar in the Computer Science Department at Harvard University. She has briefed Congress on a variety of issues, including digital rights management and security and privacy of digital identity systems. Landau was a distinguished engineer at Sun Microsystems from 1999 to 2010; before that, she taught computer science at the University of Massachusetts and Wesleyan University. She is the coauthor, with Whitfield Diffie, of “Privacy on the Line: the Politics of Wiretapping and Encryption” (MIT Press, 1998; revised 2007). Her book “Surveillance or Security? The Risks Posed by New Wiretapping Technologies” has been awarded the annual book prize by the Surveillance Studies Network.
Interview with Susan Landau is available here.
Further readings: http://privacyink.org/
