Susan Landau

This information is accurate as of the fellowship year indicated for each fellow.

Susan Landau studies the interplay between privacy, cybersecurity, and public policy. 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 will be published by MIT Press in spring 2011. At the Radcliffe Institute, Landau will examine the security risks of an experimental system being used to prevent intrusion of malicious software into federal government computer networks. Because the system surveils all communications into federal government networks, the project raises a number of privacy and security concerns. With an eye to improving security, Landau will look at the government’s role in providing information assurance to nonclassified national systems. Landau is the recipient of a 2008 Women of Vision Award, a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and an Association for Computing Machinery Distinguished Engineer. She is a member of the Computer Science and Telecommunications Board of the National Academies and of the advisory committee for the Computer and Information Science and Engineering Directorate of the National Science Foundation. She received her PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, her MS from Cornell University, and her BA from Princeton University.