The computer professional often uses the terminology “computer security” and “computer system privacy” as almost synonyms. In this chapter, the authors do a very good job of illustrating some of the distinctions between these two concepts. They describe security as procedural and outline technical measures to prevent unauthorized access to data stored or processed in a computer system, to prevent any deliberate denial of service, and to protect the system from physical harm. They also discuss privacy in terms of the potential problems that an individual encounters when information is given to a record-keeping system for one given purpose, and that information is then used for other purposes.

The authors discuss the Privacy Act of 1974 as well as other, more recent proposed legislation. They provide some estimates on the costs that have been incurred in implementing this Act and also give some related statistics on reported cases of computer abuse. Unfortunately, those statistics date back to 1975 and are, thus, not that helpful for the researcher.

While there are many open issues in the area of privacy, the authors suggest that computer security is now reasonably well understood without many open issues. They describe such security in terms of physical, computer hardware, software, communications, and personnel safeguards. They describe how these all form a “conceptual security fence” around a computer system.

There is also a brief discussion of integrity and auditing. Both of these issues are described in terms of verifying program correctness. It is pointed out that there has been very little progress in developing practical program proving or testing techniques. They suggest that more sophisticated security threat monitoring methods require a greater ability to characterize threats in terms of better measurable systems variables.

The chapter provides a good, general introduction to the distinctions between computer privacy and computer security. While there is not an extensive discussion of the many privacy issues, the material provides a clear explanation of some of the differences. The chapter also provides a good reference bibliography for further reading.