From The Editors

 

EIC Messages from Security & Privacy Magazine

From 2002 through 2011 I served as associate-editor-in-chief of Security & Privacy magazine, a publication of the IEEE Computer Society.  Working with George Cybenko of Dartmouth, Fred Schneider of Cornell, Carl Landwehr of the University of Maryland, and a number of  colleagues we had produced a trial issue in 2002.  The issue was a success, prompting the IEEE to launch the magazine in 2003.  George, who had started the project, served as the Editor in Chief (EIC) for the first four years with the rest of us helping out as associate-EICs.

The new magazine was tremendously successful, quickly becoming one of the top three IEEE Computer Society magazines and the only one of the top three that was optional, requiring an “opt in” to subscribe.

My most notable contribution to the content of the magazine was a whimsical series of articles about science fiction and its relationship to engineering and society published in the department called Biblio Tech and reproduced on this blog.

In addition to Biblio Tech my role as associate-EIC was to find interesting security and privacy work and persuade the authors to submit articles to the magazine, to supervise the review of various submissions as assigned to me by the EIC, and to write occasional EIC messages, short editorials, for issues of the magazine.

At the end of 2011 I stepped down as associate EIC.  While I remain on the editorial board, I am essentially no longer actively involved in the work of the magazine.  This was a difficult choice, but one that I made because my activities had become less and less relevant to the work of the magazine and I felt that it would be better if someone else took my place, bringing a fresh perspective.

The way George, and subsequent EICs, ran the EIC message process was to write a couple himself, and then get the rest of us to volunteer to write some of the others.  During the ten years that I served as associate-EIC I wrote fifteen of these “From the Editors” pieces.  While these all appeared under my byline, I had the benefit of intensive reviews by the other three.  This feedback was extremely valuable … in some cases it led me to entirely rethink my approach to the topic, while in others it provided refinement and nuance that I would have missed on my own.  And sometimes I ignored the advice.

The IEEE has graciously permitted me to reproduce these editorials on my blog.

On this page I am organizing all of the EIC messages that appeared under my byline over the ten years of my active involvement in the magazine.  They are in chronological order by date of appearance, as on the Biblio Tech page, with links both to the reproductions here and to the primary copies on the Computer Society site.

Title (here)	Original
Toward a Security Ontology	V1N3 May/June 2003
Whose Data Are These Anyway	V2N3 May/June 2004
A Witty Lesson	V2N4 July/August 2004
What’s in a Name?	V3N2 March/April 2005
There Ain’t No Inside, There Ain’t No Outside …	V3N5 September/October 2005
The Impending Debate	V4N2 March/April 2006
Insecurity through Obscurity	V4N5 September/October 2006
Cyberassault on Estonia	V5N4 July/August 2007
Charge of the Light Brigade	V6N1 January/February 2008
Reading (with) the Enemy	V7N1 January/February 2009
New Models for Old	V7N4 July/August 2009
International Blues	V8N2 March/April 2010
Phagocytes in Cyberspace	V8N4 July/August 2010
Privacy and the System Life Cycle	V9N2 March/April 2011
The Invisible Computers	V9N6 November/December 2011