Oral History Interview with L. Jean Camp

Abstract

This oral history interview is sponsored by NSF 2202484 “Mining a Useable Past: Perspectives, Paradoxes, and Possibilities with Security and Privacy,” a project at the Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota. At the start of the interview, Professor L. Jean Camp shares interests in her youth and life at college, and her work experience at the Catawba Nuclear plant. Then she turns to the course that led her to study engineering and public policy at Carnegie Mellon. She also describes and contextualizes her dissertation, titled “Privacy and Reliability in Internet Commerce.” She discusses her experience with the Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility, and her interaction with her mentors, Marvin Sirbu and Doug Tygar. Then she provides the context to co-authoring with Donna Riley on gender and women's justice advocacy work; and she relates her various research on security, communication, and privacy.

Later in the interview, Camp talks about her early participation with the research group called Economics of Information Security during her time at Kennedy School, Harvard. Camp discusses joining the faculty in the School of Informatics at Indiana University. She also reflects on the human aspects of IPv4 and security. She shares her thoughts on a variety of topics, including, SOPA, the contexts of autonomic transactions, blockchain and cryptocurrency, relation between privacy and security, mental models and risk communication, crowdsourcing of security and peer production, privacy statements for websites, security of SDN and security, autonomy, and control. She also provides context of her two books, Economics of Medical and Financial Theft and the edited volume Economics of Information Security.