Swarthmore College Department of Computer Science

Talk by Susan Landau

National Security on the Line: Electronic Communications in an Age of Terror
Monday, Feb. 21
10:30 am, SCI 183

Abstract

Wiretaps have been used since the invention of the telegraph and have been a legal element of the U.S. law-enforcement arsenal for over a quarter century. In 1994, in keeping with law enforcement's efforts to have laws stay current with changing technologies, Congress passed the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA). This controversial law, which mandated that digitally-switched telephone networks must be built wiretap compatible, was not easily implemented. Now, in a move that may prove dangerous to national security, the FBI is seeking to extend CALEA to Voice over IP (VoIP). In this talk, we discuss wiretapping, the Internet, and communications security, and what national-security needs are in this new communications environment.

This talk will be followed by an informal question and answer session, including "What Math and CS people do at Sun that is NOT coding!".

Biography

Susan Landau is: "Senior Staff Engineer at Sun Microsystems Laboratories, where she concentrates on the interplay between security and public policy. Before joining Sun, Landau was a faculty member at the University of Massachusetts and Wesleyan University. She and Whitfield Diffie have written Privacy on the Line: The Politics of Wiretapping and Encryption. She is a member of the National Institute of Standards and Technology's Information Security and Privacy Advisory Board and she maintains researcHers, a mailing list for women computer science researchers and the Booklist, a list of computer science books by women computer scientists." For more info, see here.