Leading thinkers on how the Internet is eroding privacy rights – and what can be done to halt digital incursions into our lives – will debate the topic at a public forum on Tuesday, April 24, hosted by Columbia University's Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science, and the Marconi International Fellowship Foundation. The high-level forum will bring together experts on telecommunications, computer technology and security, and privacy activists.

Moderated by Zvi Galil, an encryption expert and dean of engineering at Columbia, participants will include Whitfield Diffie, whose breakthrough formulations 25 years ago established the key to secure electronic communications; John Podesta, White House chief of staff under President Clinton and now visiting professor of law at Georgetown University Law Center; Michael Rabin, professor of computer science at Harvard University, who has developed a new computer security code reported recently in the media based on a "vanishing" key; author and journalist Steven Levy, whose books "Crypto" and "Hackers" explore privacy in the information age; Shari Steele, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Association, which advocates for civil liberties online, and Eli Noam, an authority on telecommunications strategy and policy at Columbia Business School.

The 2001 Marconi Forum on Internet Privacy is a collaboration between Columbia's engineering, business and journalism schools and the Marconi Foundation, which makes its academic home at the Fu Foundation School and each year recognizes creative work in telecommunications and information technology and its benefit to humanity through a $100,000 fellowship. Diffie, a scientist at Sun Microsystems, and his collaborator on public key cyptography, Martin Hellman of Stanford University, were the 2000 winners of the most prestigious prize in this field.

In an age of electronic communications and financial transactions, web users want assurances that their messages or e-commerce will remain private without worrying that their ideas, or even their identities, will be stolen and every detail of their lives laid bare while others profit from personal data collection.

Digital threats arise from all quarters, including corporations and marketing firms, potential employers and credit agencies, health and government establishments, as well as outright snoopers and opportunists. The stakes are high. Online retailers need to track users' surfing and buying habits better and to create profiles that are more easily shared among marketers. But these methods have led to a consumer backlash and stepped up consumer demands for control of their private data and accountability from online companies.

Pressure is mounting from consumer groups and others to rein in cyber-snoops. No fewer than seven bills have been proposed on Capitol Hill, even as several recent privacy incursions in the corporate world have focused a spotlight on the issue. Most notable was the public outcry that greeted the Web ad network doubleClick's proposal to link online web-surfing with off-line consumer databases.

A recent poll by the Wall Street Journal found that corporate privacy policies were read by about half of the poll respondents at least occasionally and more than half of this group stopped using a web site or decided against an online purchase because of privacy concerns.

The two-hour forum will address whether improved technologies can protect privacy on the Internet and will consider recent developments, such as Microsoft's proposed high-tech solution to the privacy problem, the P3P system, which lets consumers choose how much protection they want by adjusting their own web browsers.

The panel will be invited to respond to questions from an audience from industry, academia, publishing and government. "Prvacy Under Assault: Can Encryption Safeguard the Internet?" will get underway at 4 P.M. in the Davis Auditorium of the Schapiro Center for Engineering and Physical Science Research on the Columbia campus, Broadway at West 116th Street.