CRCS Lunch Seminar

Date: Monday, April 2, 2012
Time: 12:00pm – 1:30pm
Place: Maxwell Dworkin 119

Speaker: Susan Landau, Visiting Scholar,  Computer Science, Harvard University

Title: PBS Great Decisions: Cybersecurity
http://www.fpa.org/features/index.cfm?act=feature amp;announcement_id=125

Abstract: This year’s Great Decisions program http://www.fpa.org/great_decisions/ has produced a program on cybersecurity, focusing on the international issues:

The securitization of cyberspace has caused a sea change for both governments and the private sector, faced with new threats, new battlegrounds and new opportunities. Faced with challenges such as international cybercrime and authoritarian control of networks, how will the U.S. and its democratic allies approach the cyber frontier? How does this new domain figure in U.S. strategic interests?

Computer scientists have one sense of what the cybersecurity problem is, Washington has a somewhat different one. This talk is the half-hour program (to be aired on WGBH March 16) followed by a Q&A with Susan Landau, who is visiting computer science this year.

Short Bio: Susan Landau is currently a Visiting Scholar in the Computer Science Department at Harvard University. She was previously a Distinguished Engineer at Sun Microsystems, and held faculty positions at the University of Massachusetts and Wesleyan University. She has worked on security, cryptography, and policy, including surveillance and digital-rights management issues. Landau is the author of “Surveillance or Security? The Risks Posed by New Wiretapping Technologies” (MIT Press, 2011), coauthor, with Whitfield Diffie, of “Privacy on the Line: the Politics of Wiretapping and Encryption” (MIT Press, 1998; rev. 2007), and the author of numerous computer science and public policy papers, as well as op-eds on cybersecurity and encryption policy. She is a member of the National Research Council Computer Science and Telecommunications Board and serves on the advisory committee for the National Science Foundation’s Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering. Landau was a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, is a recipient of the 2008 Women of Vision Social Impact Award, and is a fellow of both the AAAS and the ACM. She received her BA from Princeton, her MS from Cornell, and her PhD from MIT.