Privacy on the Line: The Politics of Wiretapping and Encryption

Diffie, Whitfield, and Landau, Susan

ISBN 10: 0262041677 / ISBN 13: 9780262041676

Published by The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1998

About this Item

xi, [3], 35 p. Notes. Bibliography. Index.

Seller Inventory # 66660

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Privacy on the Line: The Politics of Wiretapping and Encryption
• Publisher: The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA
• Publication Date: 1998
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0262041677
• ISBN 13: 9780262041676
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition: Presumed first edition/first printing.
• Condition: Very good
• Dust Jacket Condition: very good

About this title

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 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.