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.