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Date: 2015/1/6

Place: Collaboration Room #7 15:30 - 17:30

Name: Koichiro Hayashi
    Professor, Institute of Information Security


Title: Cybersecurity and Secrecy of Communication

Secrecy of Communication (hereinafter SoC) is a means to preserve privacy in the process of communication as one of the fundamental human rights. As the postal system, born in the Feudal Age, had long been accompanied by censorship, people could not have relied on the system. Prohibition of censorship was one of the main targets of French Revolution, which implies how important SoC is for the human rights.
Japanese Constitution, enacted after the Second World War, naturally contains the provision for SoC (the latter sentence of Item 2, Article 21). Moreover, Japan is considered to be the strictest observer of SoC. We should be proud of it, but we are too much accustomed to the status quo to talk about its boundaries or limitations. This reluctance is similar to the discussions on Article 9 of the Constitution.
It is a common sense in the international perspective that prohibition of censorship (the former sentence of Item 2, Article 21) is mandatory, but SoC is balanced with other legal interests, and may yield to the superior ones as exceptions. Such exceptions include the searches and seizures against the crime, and intelligence activities. Further, especially in regard to cybersecurity, how to deal with communication logs is becoming another issue in light of SoC.
In this lecture, I will resolve the traditional myth about SoC, and introduce my new understanding to reconstruct it to keep pace with the recent developments such as cyberesecurity.

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