A guide to the debate over cryptography policy and the implications for individual privacy.Telecommunication has never been perfectly secure, as a Cold War culture of wiretaps and international spying taught us. Yet many of us still take our privacy for granted, even as we become more reliant than ever on telephones, computer networks, and electronic transactions of all kinds. Whitfield Diffie and Susan Landau argue that if we are to retain the privacy that characterized face-to-face relationships in the past, we must build the means of protecting that privacy into our communication systems.
Diffie and Landau strip away the hype surrounding the policy debate to examine the national security, law enforcement, commercial, and civil liberties issues. They discuss the social function of privacy, how it underlies a democratic society, and what happens when it is lost.
Whitfield Diffie, the inventor of public-key cryptography, is Visiting Professor at Royal Holloway College at the University of London.
Susan Landau is Bridge Professor in the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy and the School of Engineering, Department of Computer Science, at Tufts University. She 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. Landau has been a Guggenheim fellow and a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and is a member of the Cybersecurity Hall of Fame, a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and a fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery.