Susan Landau

Landau started out in pure mathematics but was pulled into the Crypto Wars. In 1998 she and Whitfield Diffie wrote Privacy on the Line, a history of American wiretapping policy from the telegraph to Clipper. Her recurring point is technical rather than moral: a wiretap capability is a vulnerability, and one built for the police can be used by anyone who finds it.

She spent years as a Distinguished Engineer at Sun and is now a professor at Tufts. In 2016, during the Apple–FBI fight over a locked iPhone, she told the House Judiciary Committee that weaker encryption would enable more crime, not less. Later books include Surveillance or Security? and Listening In.