Latest Essays
Page 37
The Court of Public Opinion Is About Mob Justice and Reputation as Revenge
Recently, Elon Musk and The New York Times took to Twitter and the internet to argue the data —and their grievances—over a failed road test and car review. Meanwhile, an Applebee’s server is part of a Change.org petition to get her job back after posting a pastor’s no-tip receipt comment online. And when he wasn’t paid quickly enough, a local Fitness SF web developer rewrote the company’s webpage to air his complaint.
All of these ‘cases’ are seeking their judgments in the court of public opinion. The court of public opinion has a full docket; even brick-and-mortar establishments aren’t immune…
How Secure Is the Papal Election?
Spanish translation
Portuguese translation
As the College of Cardinals prepares to elect a new pope, security people like me wonder about the process. How does it work, and just how hard would it be to hack the vote?
The rules for papal elections are steeped in tradition. John Paul II last codified them in 1996, and Benedict XVI left the rules largely untouched. The “Universi Dominici Gregis on the Vacancy of the Apostolic See and the Election of the Roman Pontiff” is surprisingly detailed.
Every cardinal younger than 80 is eligible to vote. We expect 117 …
Trust and Society
This morning, I flew from Boston to New York. Before that, I woke up in a hotel, trusting everyone on the staff who has a master key. I took a Boston taxi to the airport, trusting not just the taxi driver, but everyone else on the road. At Boston’s Logan Airport, I had to trust everyone who worked for the airline, everyone who worked at the airport, and the thousands of other passengers. I also had to trust everyone who came in contact with the food I bought and ate before boarding my plane. In New York, I similarly had to trust everyone at LaGuardia Airport, my New York taxi driver, and the staff at my new hotel—where I am right now, writing this…
Power And The Internet
This essay appeared as a response to Edge‘s annual question, “What *Should* We Be Worried About?“
All disruptive technologies upset traditional power balances, and the Internet is no exception. The standard story is that it empowers the powerless, but that’s only half the story. The Internet empowers everyone. Powerful institutions might be slow to make use of that new power, but since they are powerful, they can use it more effectively. Governments and corporations have woken up to the fact that not only can they use the Internet, they can control it for their interests. Unless we start deliberately debating the future we want to live in, and information technology in enabling that world, we will end up with an Internet that benefits existing power structures and not society in general…
Our New Regimes of Trust
Society runs on trust. Over the millennia, we’ve developed a variety of mechanisms to induce trustworthy behavior in society. These range from a sense of guilt when we cheat, to societal disapproval when we lie, to laws that arrest fraudsters, to door locks and burglar alarms that keep thieves out of our homes. They’re complicated and interrelated, but they tend to keep society humming along.
The information age is transforming our sociey. We’re shifting from evolved social systems to deliberately created socio-technical systems. Instead of having conversations in offices, we use Facebook. Instead of meeting friends, we IM. We shop online. We let various companies and governments collect comprehensive dossiers on our movements, our friendships, and our interests. We let others censor what we see and read. I could go on for pages…
Unsafe Security: A Sociologist Aptly Analyzes our Failures in Top-Down Protection
Against Security: How We Go Wrong at Airports, Subways, and Other Sites of Ambiguous Danger, by Harvey Molotch, Princeton University Press, 278 pages, $35.
Security is both a feeling and a reality, and the two are different things. People can feel secure when they’re actually not, and they can be secure even when they believe otherwise.
This discord explains much of what passes for our national discourse on security policy. Security measures often are nothing more than security theater, making people feel safer without actually increasing their protection…
Militarizing Cyberspace Will Do More Harm Than Good
We’re in the early years of a cyberwar arms race. It’s expensive, it’s destabilising and it threatens the very fabric of the internet we use every day. Cyberwar treaties, as imperfect as they might be, are the only way to contain the threat.
If you read the press and listen to government leaders, we’re already in the middle of a cyberwar. By any normal definition of the word ‘war’, this is ridiculous. But the definition of cyberwar has been expanded to include government-sponsored espionage, potential terrorist attacks in cyberspace, large-scale criminal fraud and even hacker kids attacking government networks and critical infrastructure. This definition is being pushed by the military and government contractors, both of which are gaining power and making money from cyberwar fears…
When It Comes to Security, We're Back to Feudalism
Some of us have pledged our allegiance to Google: We have Gmail accounts, we use Google Calendar and Google Docs, and we have Android phones. Others have pledged allegiance to Apple: We have Macintosh laptops, iPhones, and iPads; and we let iCloud automatically synchronize and back up everything. Still others of us let Microsoft do it all. Or we buy our music and e-books from Amazon, which keeps records of what we own and allows downloading to a Kindle, computer, or phone. Some of us have pretty much abandoned e-mail altogether … for Facebook…
Lance Armstrong and the Prisoners' Dilemma of Doping in Professional Sports
Doping in professional sports is back in the news, as the overwhelming evidence against Lance Armstrong led to his being stripped of his seven Tour de France titles and more. But instead of focusing on the issues of performance-enhancing drugs and whether professional athletes be allowed to take them, I’d like to talk about the security and economic aspects of the issue.
Because drug testing is a security issue. Various sports federations around the world do their best to detect illegal doping, and players do their best to evade the tests. It’s a classic security arms race: Improvements in detection technologies lead to improvements in drug detection evasion, which in turn spur the development of better detection capabilities. Right now, it seems drugs are winning; in some places, these drug tests are described as “intelligence tests”—if you can’t get around them, you don’t deserve to play…
Fear Pays the Bills, but Accounts Must Be Settled
A lot of the debate around President Obama’s cybersecurity initiative center on how much of a burden it would be on industry, and how that should be financed. As important as that debate is, it obscures some of the larger issues surrounding cyberwar, cyberterrorism, and cybersecurity in general.
It’s difficult to have any serious policy discussion amongst the fear mongering. Secretary Panetta’s recent comments are just the latest; search the Internet for “cyber 9/11,” “cyber Peal-Harbor,” “cyber Katrina,” or—my favorite—”cyber Armageddon.”
There’s an enormous amount of money and power that results from pushing cyberwar and cyberterrorism: power within the military, the Department of Homeland Security, and the Justice Department; and lucrative government contracts supporting those organizations. As long as cyber remains a prefix that scares, it’ll continue to be used as a bugaboo…
Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.