Schneier on Security

Listen to the Audio on Steptoe.com

This bonus episode offers an interview of Bruce Schneier, the prolific security guru, about his latest book, A Hacker’s Mind: How the Powerful Bend Society’s Rules, and How to Bend Them Back. As usual with Bruce’s books, it is a good read, technically up to date and approachable. Much of the book, and of the interview, explores Bruce’s view that hacking—subverting the intent of a system of rules without actually breaking the rules—has much in common with lawyering. Finding ways to subvert a Microsoft program, Bruce argues, is not much different from exploiting loopholes in airline mileage programs or finding ways to count cards at a casino without letting the casino know what you’re doing. And those exploits are not really so different from what lawyers do when they hunt for unexpected tax loopholes to shelter income. The analogy only goes so far, as Bruce admits. It is often hard to actually define the “intent” that is being subverted, or to draw a line between subversion within the rules and just plain rule-breaking. And hacking, for all its underdog-beats-The-Man romance, is just a tool, available to everyone, including The Man. The world’s best computer hackers mostly work for governments or corporations these days, and the same is true for the world’s best legal hackers…

Listen to the Audio on SteptoeCyberblog.com

Episode 65 would be ugly if it weren’t so much fun. Our guest is Bruce Schneier, cryptographer, computer science and privacy guru, and author of the best-selling Data and Goliath—a book I annotated every few pages of with the words, “Bruce, you can’t possibly really believe this.” And that’s pretty much how the interview goes, as Bruce and I mix it up over hackbacks, whether everyone but government should be allowed to use Big Data tools, Edward Snowden, whether “mass surveillance” has value in fighting terrorism, and whether damaging cyberattacks are really infrequent and hard to attribute. We disagree mightily—and with civility…