Lawful Hacking: Using Existing Vulnerabilities to Wiretap Internet Communication

Ahoy!

We're excited and honored to be hosting Susan Landau, Professor of Cybersecurity Policy at Worcester Polytechnic Institute among many other accolades, in our Ann Arbor office in late September. Susan will be speaking on a hot and timely topic: lawful wiretaps!

Hope to see you there! Read on for the full scoop...

Title:

Lawful Hacking: Using Existing Vulnerabilities to Wiretap Internet Communications

Abstract:

For years, legal wiretapping was straightforward: the officer doing the intercept connected a tape recorder or the like to a single pair of wires. The changing structure of telecommunications and new technologies such as ISDN and cellular telephony made executing a wiretap more complicated for law enforcement, and such simple technologies would no longer suffice. In response, the US passed the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA), which required that wiretapping capabilities be built into digital telephony switches. (Europe has similar requirements.) With new real-time communications technologies using packet-switching technologies, law enforcement has claimed it is "going dark." Several years ago, the FBI proposed changes in wiretap laws to require a CALEA-like interface in Internet software.

By requiring an architected security breach, such a "solution" would, in fact, create a great insecurity in all communications technology. I will present an alternative, namely using current vulnerabilities in order to wiretap. In this talk, I will discuss the technology issues and policy implications.

This represents joint work with Steve Bellovin, Matt Blaze, and Sandy Clark.

Bio:

Susan Landau works at the intersection of cybersecurity, national security, law, and policy. During the Crypto Wars of the 1990s, her insights on how government encryption policy skewed civil society and business needs for security helped win the argument for a relaxation of cryptographic export controls. Beginning in the early 2000s, Landau was an early voice in the argument that law-enforcement requirements for embedding surveillance within communications infrastructures created long-term national-security risks. Her position that securing private-sector telecommunications was in the national-security interest ran contrary to public thinking at the time and deeply influenced policy makers and scholars. Landau's book ``Surveillance or Security? The Risks Posed by New Wiretapping Technologies,'' (MIT Press) won the 2012 Surveillance Studies Book Prize, while ``Privacy on the Line: the Politics of Wiretapping and Encryption''co-authored with Whitfield Diffie (MIT Press, 1998) won the IEEE-USA Award for Distinguished Literary Contributions Furthering Public Understanding of the Profession and the McGannon Book Award for Social and Ethical Relevance in Communication Policy Research. Landau has testified to Congress and frequently briefed US and European policymakers on encryption, surveillance, and cybersecurity issues. Landau is Professor of Cybersecurity Policy at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, and has previously been a Senior Staff Privacy Analyst at Google, a Distinguished Engineer at Sun Microsystems, and a faculty member at the University of Massachusetts and Wesleyan University. A 2015 inductee in the Cybersecurity Hall of Fame and a 2012 Guggenheim fellow, Landau was a 2010-2011 fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study and the recipient of the 2008 Women of Vision Social Impact Award. She is also a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and of the Association for Computing Machinery. She received her BA from Princeton, her MS from Cornell, and her PhD from MIT.

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