Latest Essays
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We Don’t Need to Reinvent Our Democracy to Save It from AI
When is it time to start worrying about artificial intelligence interfering in our democracy? Maybe when an AI writes a letter to The New York Times opposing the regulation of its own technology.
That happened last month. And because the letter was responding to an essay we wrote, we’re starting to get worried. And while the technology can be regulated, the real solution lies in recognizing that the problem is human actors—and those we can do something about.
Our essay argued that the much heralded launch of the AI chatbot ChatGPT, a system that can generate text realistic enough to appear to be written by a human, poses significant threats to democratic processes. The ability to produce high quality political messaging quickly and at scale, if combined with AI-assisted capabilities to strategically target those messages to policymakers and the public, could become a powerful accelerant of an already sprawling and poorly constrained force in modern democratic life: lobbying…
The Big Idea: Bruce Schneier
The world has systems. Systems have rules. Or are they more like guidelines? In today’s Big Idea for A Hacker’s Mind, security expert Bruce Schneier takes a look at systems, how they are vulnerable, and what that fact means for all of us.
BRUCE SCHNEIER:
Hacking isn’t limited to computer systems, or even technology. Any system can be hacked.
What sorts of system? Any system of rules, really.
Think about the tax code. It’s not computer code, but it’s a series of rules—supposedly deterministic algorithms—that take data about your income and determine the amount of money you owe. This code has vulnerabilities, more commonly known as loopholes. It has exploits; those are tax avoidance strategies. And there is an entire industry of black-hat hackers who exploit vulnerabilities in the tax code: we call them accountants and tax attorneys…
Opinion: What Peter Thiel and the ‘Pudding Guy’ revealed
The Roth IRA is a retirement account allowed by a 1997 law. It’s intended for middle-class investors and has limits on both the investor’s income level and the amount that can be invested.
But billionaire Peter Thiel and others found a hack. As one of the founders of PayPal, Thiel was able—entirely legally— to use an investment of less than $2,000 to buy 1.7 million shares of the company at $0.001 per share, turning it into $5 billion in 20 years—all forever tax-free, according to ProPublica. (Thiel’s spokesperson didn’t respond to ProPublica’s questions about its 2021 report.)…
How ChatGPT Hijacks Democracy
Launched just weeks ago, ChatGPT is already threatening to upend how we draft everyday communications like emails, college essays and myriad other forms of writing.
Created by the company OpenAI, ChatGPT is a chatbot that can automatically respond to written prompts in a manner that is sometimes eerily close to human.
But for all the consternation over the potential for humans to be replaced by machines in formats like poetry and sitcom scripts, a far greater threat looms: artificial intelligence replacing humans in the democratic processes—not through voting, but through lobbying…
How to Decarbonize Crypto
The sins of FTX aren’t the only problem the crypto world needs to pay for.
Maintaining bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies causes about 0.3 percent of global CO2 emissions. That may not sound like a lot, but it’s more than the emissions of Switzerland, Croatia, and Norway combined. As many cryptocurrencies crash and the FTX bankruptcy moves into the litigation stage, regulators are likely to scrutinize the crypto world more than ever before. This presents a perfect opportunity to curb their environmental damage.
The good news is that cryptocurrencies don’t have to be carbon intensive. In fact, some have near-zero emissions. To encourage polluting currencies to reduce their carbon footprint, we need to force buyers to pay for their environmental harms through taxes…
Centralized Vs. Decentralized Data Systems—Which Choice Is Best?
Healthcare and insurance payers spend nearly $496 billion each year on billing and insurance-related costs, noted Bruce Schneier, chief of security architecture at Inrupt—a company created by the father of the modern web, Tim Berners-Lee. As the amount of data continues to grow, it is becoming more difficult for healthcare providers to access necessary information when treating patients.
Providers typically turn to centralized means such as healthcare information exchanges, but these present a laundry list of potential problems, Schneier argued…
NIST’s Post-Quantum Cryptography Standards Competition
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Quantum computing is a completely new paradigm for computers. A quantum computer uses quantum properties such as superposition, which allows a qubit (a quantum bit) to be neither 0 nor 1, but something much more complicated. In theory, such a computer can solve problems too complex for conventional computers.
Current quantum computers are still toy prototypes, and the engineering advances required to build a functionally useful quantum computer are somewhere between a few years away and impossible. Even so, we already know that that such a computer could potentially factor large numbers and compute discrete logs, and break the RSA and Diffie-Hellman public-key algorithms in all of the useful key sizes…
When Corporate Interests and International Cyber Agreements Collide
The Paris Call for Trust and Stability in Cyberspace is an initiative launched by French President Emmanuel Macron during the 2018 UNESCO’s Internet Governance Forum. It’s an attempt by the world’s governments to come together and create a set of international norms and standards for a reliable, trustworthy, safe, and secure Internet. It’s not an international treaty, but it does impose obligations on the signatories. It’s a major milestone for global Internet security and safety.
Corporate interests are all over this initiative, sponsoring and managing different parts of the process. As part of the Call, the French company Cigref and the Russian company Kaspersky chaired …
Why Vaccine Cards Are So Easily Forged
Sometimes a little security theater isn’t the worst thing.
My proof of COVID vaccination is recorded on an easy-to-forge paper card. With little trouble, I could print a blank form, fill it out, and snap a photo. Small imperfections wouldn’t pose any problem; you can’t see whether the paper’s weight is right in a digital image. When I fly internationally, I have to show a negative COVID test result. That, too, would be easy to fake. I could change the date on an old test, or put my name on someone else’s test, or even just make something up on my computer. After all, there’s no standard format for test results; airlines accept anything that looks plausible…
Letter to the US Senate Judiciary Committee on App Stores
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The Honorable Dick Durbin
Chair
Committee on Judiciary
711 Hart Senate Office Building
Washington, D.C. 20510
The Honorable Amy Klobuchar
Chair
Subcommittee on Competition Policy,
Antitrust, and Consumer Rights
425 Dirksen Senate Office Building
Washington, D.C. 20510
The Honorable Chuck Grassley
Ranking Member
Committee on Judiciary
135 Hart Senate Office Building
Washington, D.C. 20510
The Honorable Mike Lee
Ranking Member
Subcommittee on Competition Policy,
Antitrust, and Consumer Rights
361A Russell Senate Office Building…
Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.