Privacy on the Line: The Politics of Wiretapping and Encryption - Hardcover

Diffie, Whitfield; Landau, Susan

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0262041677 ISBN 13: 9780262041676

Publisher: Mit Pr, 1998

Synopsis

1999 IEEE-USAB Award for Distinguished Literary Contributions Furthering Public Understanding of the Profession. and Winner of the 1998 Donald McGannon Award for Social and Ethical Relevance in Communication Policy Research

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.

About this title

About the Author

Whitfield Diffie, the inventor of public-key cryptography, is Distinguished Engineer at Sun Microsystems, Inc. Susan Landau is Research Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst.

Reviews

Comsec, sigint, NSA, NIST, DES, Clipper chip, key escrow?such technobabble related to intelligence-gathering can baffle the uninitiated. This authoritative treatise helps unveil some of the mystery and puts contemporary freedom, privacy and security issues in perspective. After explaining basic concepts of cryptography, the authors cover the history of 20th-century intelligence gathering, then recount the long, discouraging saga of the U.S. government's invasions of its citizens' privacy. In World War II, census data were used illegally to round up Japanese Americans. In the 1950s and '60s, the CIA read private mail, and in the 1970s, it monitored research requests in public libraries. The electronic spying of our security agencies is not even a law-enforcement bargain?wiretapping is costly and produces arguably modest results. Issues of the 1990s include the 1992 Digital Telephone Proposal, the legal vicissitudes of "Pretty Good Privacy," and the government's attempts to require key escrow (storage of keys so that the government can crack coded messages). As in earlier times, we still see competition between the various security bureaucracies. Diffie is a distinguished engineer at Sun Microsystems and the inventor of public-key cryptography (software that encodes a document with one key and deciphers it with another); Landau is a research associate professor in the department of computer science at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Together, they bring formidable expertise to bear on complex topics.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Respected cryptographer Diffie and noted computer scientist Landau here examine a range of telecommunication issues ranging from individual privacy to national security. They begin with a chapter on the basics of cryptography, a system of writing messages in secured form using codes and ciphers and then move on to discuss issues of public policy, law enforcement, and civil liberties as they relate to modern communications systems. Following an enlightening discussion on wiretapping practices that describes how messages are intercepted and how agencies use the information they intercept, Diffie and Landau show why intelligence and law-enforcement agencies view cryptography in communications as a threat to their existence. They analyze the sociology of privacy, how it forms the underpinnings of a democratic society, and what happens when it is lost. The authors conclude by arguing that if we are to retain privacy in communicating with each other, we must build the means of protecting that privacy into our present communication systems. A call to arms for removing restrictions to such secure communications systems, this is an important and timely work for most libraries.?Joe J. Accardi, Northeastern Illinois Univ. Lib., Chicago
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Mit Pr
• Publication date: 1998
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0262041677
• ISBN 13: 9780262041676
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 2
• Number of pages: 352