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
Biography
An interdisciplinary scholar, Landau works at the intersection of privacy, surveillance, cybersecurity, and the law. She has testified before Congress and briefed US and European policymakers on encryption, Landau and Whitfield Diffie won the McGannon Book Award for Social and Ethical Relevance in Communication Policy Research for Privacy on the Line: The Politics of Wiretapping and Encryption. She received the Surveillance Studies Book Prize for Surveillance or Security? The Risks Posed by New Wiretapping Technologies, the USENIX Lifetime Achievement Award, shared with Steven Bellovin and Matt Blaze, and the American Mathematical Society's Bertrand Russell Prize. Landau has served on committees of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, on the National Science Foundation Computer and Information Science Engineering Advisory Board, the National Institute of Standards and Technology Information Security and Privacy Advisory Board, and on mathematics and computer science journal editorial boards. Landau received her BA from Princeton, MS from Cornell, and PhD from MIT.
Landau is strongly committed to the success of women and members of underrepresented groups in science. She currently serves on the External Advisory Board for the Spelman College program in cyber security and policy. Her previous activities have included co-creating the graduate student GREPSEC workshops in privacy and security for women and members of underrepresented groups, conceiving of and co-creating the ACM Athena Lectureship, which honors senior women researchers, starting researcHers, a mailing list for women computer science researchers in academia, industry and government labs and co-organizing the first MIT Celebration of Women in Math meeting. Landau received the 2008 Women of Vision Social Impact Award from the Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology.
Selected Publications
Landau, S. (2022). Cyberwar in Ukraine: What You See Is Not What’s Really There. Lawfare: Lawfare.
Landau, S. (2016). The real security issues of the iPhone case: Law enforcement needs 21st-century investigative savvy. Science, 352(6292), 1398-1399. doi:10.1126/science.aaf7708
Landau, S. (2015). Control use of data to protect privacy. Science, 347(6221), 504-506. doi:10.1126/science.aaa4961
Bellovin, S. M., Blaze, M., Landau, S., & Pell, S. K. (2016). It's Too Complicated: How the Internet Upends Katz, Smith, and Electronic Surveillance Law.
Abelson, H., Anderson, R., Bellovin, S. M., Benaloh, J., Blaze, M., Diffie, W., . . . Weitzner, D. J. (2015). Keys under doormats: Mandating insecurity by requiring government access to all data and communications. Journal of Cybersecurity, 1(1), 69-79. doi:10.1093/cybsec/tyv009
Landau, S. (2017). Listening in Cybersecurity in an Insecure Age. Yale University Press.
Landau, S., Bellvoin, S., & Lin, H. (2019). Limiting the undesired impact of cyber weapons: Technical requirements and policy implications. In A. Zegart, & H. Lin (Eds.), Bytes, Bombs, and Spies (pp. 265-288). Washington DC: Brookings Institution Press.
Landau, S. (2014). Under the radar: NSA's efforts to secure private-sector telecommunications infrastructure. Journal of National Security Law and Policy, 7(3), 411-442.
Landau, S., & Lubin, A. (n.d.). Examining the Anomalies, Explaining the Value: Should the USA FREEDOM Act’s Metadata Program be Extended?. SSRN Electronic Journal. doi:10.2139/ssrn.3434358
Landau, S. (2020). Categorizing Uses of Communications Metadata: Systematizing Knowledge and Presenting a Path for Privacy. In ACM International Conference Proceeding Series (pp. 1-19). doi:10.1145/3442167.3442171