Susan Landau is Bridge Professor in the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy and the School of Engineering, Department of Computer Science, Tufts University. Her new book, "Listening In: Cybersecurity in an Insecure Age," was recently published by Yale University Press. Landau has testified before Congress and briefed U.S. and European policymakers on encryption, surveillance, and cybersecurity issues. 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 and Wesleyan University. She is a member of the Cybersecurity Hall of Fame, a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and of the Association for Computing Machinery.
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Rep. Anna Eshoo and Sen. Ron Wyden have written a thoughtful letter calling on law enforcement to employ currently available digital investigative capabilities.
We all remember the conclusions of the January 2017 Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) report:
National Security Agency (NSA) General Counsel Glenn Gerstell presented an interesting and surprising challenge last week, writing in the New York Times that the United States must be ready to face the “profound and enduring implications of the digital revolution.” The essay was interesting in that Gerstell’s writing was almost philosophical, rather than a direct call to action (not exactly a common mode of address for general counsels of intelligence agencies),
Encryption and its effects on law enforcement’s access to data seem to occupy a perennial place in the headlines (and on Lawfare as well). The two of us have been working on it for years. The subject is often highly contested, but the fierce discussion has ignored some critical factors. One of those is how changing usage patterns and technologies will affect how law enforcement can—or can’t—obtain access.
Last week, reports surfaced from the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal that the NSA may be shutting down the Section 215 program accessing domestic call detail records (CDRs).
Lawfare has run a series of posts concerning exceptional access.
The New York Times reported a mind-boggling story on Oct. 24. The president of the United States routinely ignores the advice of his aides and calls old friends on an unsecured iPhone “no different from hundreds of millions of iPhones in use around the world.” There are policy reasons why this is bad. These calls don’t get logged by the White House and hence aren't noted by his senior aides.