Susan Landau

Susan Landau is Bridge Professor in Cyber Security and Policy at The Fletcher School and the School of Engineering, Department of Computer Science, Tufts University, and founding director of the Tufts MS program in Cybersecurity and Public Policy. Landau's new book, People Count: Contact-Tracing Apps and Public Health (MIT Press), focuses on efficacy, equity, and privacy. Landau has written three books on encryption and wiretap policy: Listening In: Cybersecurity in an Insecure Age (Yale University Press, 2017), Surveillance or Security? The Risks Posed by New Wiretapping Technologies (MIT Press, 2011) and, with Whitfield Diffie, Privacy on the Line: The Politics of Wiretapping and Encryption (MIT Press, rev. ed. 2007). Landau has testified before Congress, written for the Washington Post, Science, and Scientific American, and frequently appears on NPR and BBC. Landau has been a senior staff Privacy Analyst at Google, a Distinguished Engineer at Sun Microsystems, and a faculty member at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and Wesleyan University. She received the 2008 Women of Vision Social Impact Award, was a 2010-2011 fellow of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, was a 2012 Guggenheim fellow, was inducted into the Cybersecurity Hall of Fame in 2015 and into the Information System Security Association Hall of Fame in 2018. She is also a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the Association for Computing Machinery.

Susan Landau works at the intersection of cybersecurity, national security, law, and policy. During the Crypto Wars of the 1990s, her insights on how government encryption policy skewed civil society and business needs for security helped win the argument for a relaxation of cryptographic export controls. Beginning in the early 2000s, Landau was an early leading voice in the argument that law-enforcement requirements for embedding surveillance within communication infrastructures created long-term national-security risks. Her position that securing private-sector telecommunications was in the national-security interest ran contrary to public thinking at the time and had strong impact on policy makers and scholars. Landau's new book, People Count: Contact-Tracing Apps and Public Health (MIT Press, 2021) focuses on efficacy, equity, and privacy. Her book, Listening In: Cybersecurity in an Insecure Age (Yale University Press, 2017), was written as a result of her Congressional testimony in the 2016 Apple/FBI case. Landau's book Surveillance or Security? The Risks Posed by New Wiretapping Technologies (MIT Press) won the 2012 Surveillance Studies Book Prize, while Privacy on the Line: The Politics of Wiretapping and Encryption (MIT Press), co-authored with Whitfield Diffie, won the 1998 Donald McGannon Communication Policy Research Award and the 1999 IEEE-USA Award for Distinguished Literary Contributions Furthering Public Understanding of the Profession (revised edition, 2007). Landau has testified before Congress and frequently briefed U.S. and European governments on encryption, surveillance, and cybersecurity issues. She has written for the Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune, the Christian Science Monitor, Science, and Scientific American, and has frequently appeared on NPR and BBC. In addition to her focus on security and privacy risks of communications surveillance, Landau has done research on attribution, identity, critical infrastructure protection, and digital rights management. Her earlier technical work in algebraic algorithms and symbolic computation, which brought various exponential-time problems into polynomial time, has had impact on cryptography.

Landau is Bridge Professor in Cyber Security and Policy at the The Fletcher School and the School of Engineering, Department of Computer Science, Tufts University and Senior Fellow at The Fletcher School Center for International Law and Governance. Prior to returning to academia, Landau was a Senior Staff Privacy Analyst at Google and a Distinguished Engineer at Sun Microsystems. At Sun, Landau worked on digital rights management, privacy and security aspects of federated identity management, and cryptographic export control. Landau has been a faculty member at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and Wesleyan University and held visiting positions at Harvard, Yale, Cornell, and the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute at Berkeley. She spent many wonderful summers teaching at Hampshire College Summer Studies in Mathematics, a program for high-ability high school students (cf. Supporting a National Treasure and Will '17 be the Year of the Pig?).

Landau is a member of the National Academies Division of Engineering and Physical Science Committee, the Committee on International Security Studies, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Center for Democracy and Technology Advisory Council.. She has previously served on the National Academies Forum on Cyber Resilience and the Computer Science and Telecommunications Board and served on various Academies studies. Landau has also been a member of the advisory committee for the National Science Foundation's Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering, the National Institute of Standards and Technology's Information Security and Privacy Advisory Board, and the Commission on Cyber Security for the 44th Presidency. She is area editor for political and policy perspectives for the Journal of Cybersecurity and contributing editor for Lawfare. She was associate editor in chief and associate editor for IEEE Security and Privacy from 2013-2016 and 2005-2012 respectively, section board member for the Communications of the ACM from 2008-2014 and associate editor of the Notices of the American Mathematical Society from 1994-2001. Landau is active in issues related to women in science. With Terry Benzel and Hilarie Orman, she organized security research meetings for women and members of underrepresented groups. Landau started researcHers, a mailing list for women computer science researchers in academia, industry and government labs and with Elaine Weyuker, created the ACM Athena Lectureship, an award celebrating outstanding women researchers. In 2008 Landau co-chaired the MIT Celebration of Women in Math meeting. She has served on the executive committee of ACM-W and the Computing Research Association Committee on the Status of Women in Computing Research (CRAW).

She received the 2008 Women of Vision Social Impact Award, was a 2010-2011 fellow of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, was a 2012 Guggenheim fellow, was inducted into the Cybersecurity Hall of Fame in 2015 and into the Information System Security Association Hall of Fame in 2018. Landau is also a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the Association for Computing Machinery. She received her BA from Princeton, her MS from Cornell, and her PhD from MIT.

Research/Areas of Interest:

Cybersecurity policy, Privacy, Communications Surveillance

Education

• Ph.D., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, United States, 1983
• M.S., Cornell University, Ithaca, United States, 1979
• B.A., Princeton University, Princeton, United States, 1976