Security, Power, and the Internet

Reading Group, Spring 2014, Harvard Law School

Bruce Schneier

1 classroom credit

This reading group will explore how the Internet affects power, and how power affects the Internet. By “power” I mean something very general: institutional power such as governments and large corporations, and distributed power such as criminals and dissident groups. Topics will include:

  • technologies of social control: surveillance, censorship, propaganda, and use control
  • technologies of evading the same
  • the social value of breaking the rules
  • the metaphor of data as pollution, and the public good from data sharing versus the individual interest of data privacy: security data, health data, education data, behavioral data, etc.
  • changing societal norms and how different power groups influence them
  • anything else we find interesting.

This builds on much of my writing on NSA surveillance, as well as the talk I gave at TEDxCambridge in September, available here.

I also have a 3000-word essay on this, available here.

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Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.