News: 2025 Archives

Algorithmic Optimism, Democratic Reality

A review of Bruce Schneier and Nathan E. Sanders, Rewiring Democracy: How AI Will Transform Our Politics, Government, and Citizenship (The MIT Press, 2025).

  • Lawfare
  • December 19, 2025

It is telling that when admitted artificial intelligence (AI) optimists write a book about how AI can have a significant positive impact on democracy, they want their readers to know they did not use AI to help them write their book. That is exactly what Bruce Schneier and Nathan E. Sanders do in Rewiring Democracy: “While we see many useful applications of AI, we wrote this book ourselves. All the ideas and words are our own or stemming from those we have cited or acknowledged.” It’s a revealing disclaimer. If AI holds as much promise to enhance productivity, creativity, and fairness as the authors insist, why not enlist it in the act of authorship? Implicitly, Schneier and Sanders’s disclaimer suggests that despite AI’s speed and scope, there remains something distinctly human—perhaps even superior—about thought unassisted by AI…

The Best Information Security Books of 2025

  • Ben Rothke
  • Medium
  • December 15, 2025

Excerpt

As the year ends, here is my list of the Best Information Security Books of 2025.

Information security book of the year—Rewiring Democracy

The Gartner Hype Cycle is a graphical model that represents the maturity, adoption, and social application of specific technologies. It has five phases: innovation trigger, peak of inflated expectations, trough of disillusionment, slope of enlightenment, and plateau of productivity. It is designed to help organizations assess the potential risks and benefits of new technologies.

When it comes to hype, nothing compares to AI. Yet even with all the hype, there is still immeasurable value. In …

Audio: Rewiring Democracy & Hacking Trust: Bruce Schneier on the AI Offense-Defense Balance

  • Cloud Security Podcast
  • December 15, 2025

Listen to the Audio on Cloud.WithGoogle.com

Topics covered:

  • Do you believe that AI is going to end up being a net improvement for defenders or attackers?  Is short term vs long term different?
  • We’re excited about the new book you have coming out with your co-author Nathan SandersRewiring Democracy.  We want to ask the same question, but for society: do you think AI is going to end up helping the forces of liberal democracy, or the forces of corruption, illiberalism, and authoritarianism?
  • If exploitation is always cheaper than patching (and attackers don’t follow as many rules and procedures), do we have a chance here?…

Video: Author of Rewiring Democracy Discusses How AI Combined with Algorithms Might Destabilize Democracy

  • Bannon's War Room
  • December 12, 2025

Watch the Video on Rumble.com

Bruce Schneier appeared on the podcast Bannon’s War Room to talk about his new book Rewiring Democracy.

AI Is a Power Amplifier. The Future Depends on Who Turns the Dials.

In “Rewiring Democracy,” Bruce Schneier and Nathan Sanders explore how AI could strengthen democracy or undermine it.

  • Kevin Dickinson
  • Big Think
  • December 9, 2025

Key Takeaways

  • AI’s impact on democracy depends less on the technology itself and more on how people choose to apply it.
  • Schneier and Sanders argue that governments and citizens must demand responsible uses of AI that enhance speed, fairness, and accessibility in public systems.
  • Without strong, activity-based regulation and public alternatives, AI risks concentrating political power and accelerating authoritarian tendencies.

You’d be forgiven for thinking AI represents a classic Faustian bargain, as every reported blessing seems tied to a sinister curse…

Closing the Year With the Books That Framed the Future

  • Lily Morris
  • The National CIO Review
  • December 8, 2025

Excerpt

As the year winds down, it feels like the right moment to look at the ideas that have influenced discussions about technology, leadership, and the changing demands on modern organizations.

The books in this roundup approach these themes in different ways.

Some explore how AI is used in real work, while others examine cybersecurity and the decisions that shape team environments.

Together, they offer a useful set of perspectives for anyone curious about the forces guiding the next stage of work and society.

Rewiring Democracy: How AI Will Transform Our Politics, Government, and Citizenship…

Book Review: Rewiring Democracy Offers a Nuanced Examination of AI’s Impact on Our Civic and Social Fabric

Readers need not be computer science graduates to understand the critical points being made. The result is a book that speaks to policymakers, civic technologists, and public servants without burying them in jargon.

  • Samuel Ross
  • The Cascadia Advocate
  • December 7, 2025

Artificial intelligence has become perhaps the top buzzword of the decade. It has become impossible to walk a block without hearing an ad, seeing a sign on a bus, or eavesdropping into a conversation without noting the presence of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, Anthropic’s Claude, or an offering from a  Silicon Valley startup.

Evident in the latest round of layoffs in greater Seattle, eager Big Tech executives are plowing ahead on a dangerous course they’ve charted. It is exhausting to find ourselves, once again, being sold every moment of our lives by a faceless corporation…

How AI Could Save Democracy Instead of Destroying It

  • Ellsworth Toohey
  • Boing Boing
  • December 4, 2025

Bruce Schneier and Nathan Sanders are asking the right question in their new book Rewiring Democracy: not whether AI will change politics, but how we can shape that change. The cybersecurity expert (behind Data and Goliath) and data scientist tackle something most AI discussions skip entirely—the nitty-gritty of democratic governance.

Their timing couldn’t be better. AI is already being used to draft legislation, analyze court documents, and run local political campaigns (most politics happens at low budgets, they point out, where AI tools can level the playing field for first-time candidates). The authors argue that AI amplifies power—and the crucial question is whose power gets amplified…

Audio: How AI Is Already Changing Our Political Campaigns

  • Fox News Radio
  • December 3, 2025

Listen to the Audio on Apple.com

Bruce Schneier appeared on Fox News Radio’s The Brian Kilmeade Show to talk about AI.

Audio: Bruce Schneier: Rewiring Democracy

  • Plutopia News Network
  • December 1, 2025

Listen to the Audio on Plutopia.io
Watch the Video on YouTube.com

On this episode of the Plutopia News Network podcast, security technologist and author Bruce Schneier joins the hosts to discuss his new book Rewiring Democracy: How AI Will Transform Our Politics, Government, and Citizenship. Schneier frames democracy as an information-processing system that aggregates citizens’ preferences into policy, and defines AI broadly as computer systems doing tasks once done by humans. He argues that AI is fundamentally a power-amplifying tool: in the hands of small-d democrats it can strengthen participation, transparency, and decision-making, but in the hands of authoritarians or monopolistic tech corporations it can just as easily supercharge surveillance, manipulation, and control. Throughout the conversation, he emphasizes that many fears attributed to “AI itself” are really fears about capitalism, corporate power, and concentrated ownership of technology, and he offers real-world examples where AI is already helping journalism, courts, voters, and legislatures. Rather than utopian hype or doom, Schneier advocates a clear-eyed, politics-first view: AI’s impact on democracy will depend less on the technology and more on who controls it and how we choose to govern its use…

Video: Bruce Schneier on Democracy in the Context of Cryptography, Security, E-Voting, AI, Power and Trust

  • Democracy Innovators Podcast
  • November 26, 2025

Listen to the Audio on DemocracyInnovators.com
Watch the Video on YouTube

Bruce Schneier is a well known cryptographer, security expert, and privacy advocate who deeply cares about society. Recent books like A Hacker’s Mind or Rewiring Democracy reflect his engagement in finding new perspectives of how democracy can be designed in better ways.

00:00 Introduction
01:36 Can cryptography keep us safe?
06:18 Electronic voting
11:56 Trust
17:13 Democracy
20:27 Technology
23:06 Citizens’ assemblies
26:36 Direct democracy
27:04 Online vs. electronic voting…

Video: Deepfakes, Misinformation & More: How AI Is Rewiring Politics

  • Lincoln Square Media
  • November 25, 2025

Watch the Video on Facebook.com

Nathan Sanders & Bruce Schneier, coauthors of Rewiring Democracy, join Susan Demas to talk about how AI and digital systems, as they currently operate, are destroying our democracy. But they also come with answers for how to fix it.

Audio: Artificial Intelligence and You

  • AI and You
  • November 24, 2025

Listen to Part 1 on AIandYou.net

How should AI change democracy? That’s the topic of Rewiring Democracy: How AI Will Transform Our Politics, Government, and Citizenship, and I am talking today with its authors.

We talk about this fascinating and scary intersection of AI and government, of AI being used in making legislation, the concept of democracy as an information system, ways AI can transform how citizens engage their governments, regulatory responses to AI from the US and around the world, and how the judicial branch can use AI.

Listen to Part 2 on AIandYou.net…

Agentic AI Could Improve Everything or Cascade into Doom

  • Gideon Lichfield
  • Bloomberg
  • November 24, 2025

After days of chaos, hundreds of deaths and trillions of dollars wiped off stock markets, the Great Agentic Cascade of July 2028 turned out to have begun much like the great internet outages of October and November 2025: with a minor bug at a major provider on which many of the world’s biggest internet services depended to manage their traffic. But in the intervening three years, the world had gone all-in on agentic AI—systems that can make and carry out decisions without human intervention. Many internet companies had created AI agents that automatically spun up servers at alternative cloud firms when their main service went down. That was their, and the world’s, undoing…

Video: After Capitalism, After Democracy

  • Wes and Dylan and Dylan Curious
  • November 20, 2025

Watch the Video on YouTube.com

Bruce Schneier appeared on the Wes and Dylan YouTube channel.

Video: Rewiring Democracy—How AI Will Transform Our Politics, Government, and Citizenship

  • C-SPAN
  • November 19, 2025

Watch the Video on C-SPAN.com

Security technologist Bruce Schneier and data scientist Nathan Sanders discussed the impact of artificial intelligence on democracy. Georgetown University hosted this event.

AI Has a Democracy Problem—Here’s Why

A thorough examination of artificial intelligence’s promise in politics rests on a thorny premise: democracy is an information system.

  • Virginia Eubanks
  • Nature
  • November 18, 2025

Rewiring Democracy: How AI Will Transform Our Politics, Government, and Citizenship Bruce Schneier and Nathan E. Sanders MIT Press (2025)

The tsunami of writing on artificial intelligence tends towards either bald hype or panicked dystopianism. Proponents say that AI will revolutionize health care, drive business growth and become our new best friend. But for its critics, AI could cause massive unemployment, perpetuate fake news and pose an extinction risk to humankind.

In Rewiring Democracy, cybersecurity expert Bruce Schneier and data scientist Nathan Sanders offer a welcome middle path by focusing on practical politics. In a heartfelt, if workmanlike, way, they craft a framework for maximizing the democratic potential of AI. Yet, by shrinking and distorting the vexing political challenges that the world faces today to fit a single solution—AI—they short-change the frustrating glories of living together as human beings…

Ben’s Book of the Month: Rewiring Democracy

  • Ben Rothke
  • RSA Conference
  • November 4, 2025

At the Infosec World 2025 conference last week, AI dominated discussions and vendor displays. One sparsely attended speaker joked that including AI in the title of his talk would have drawn a larger crowd.

When I heard about Rewiring Democracy: How AI Will Transform Our Politics, Government, and Citizenship (MIT Press) by Bruce Schneier and Dr. Nathan Sanders, I expected a harsh critique of AI’s impact on democracy, but the book instead presents a nuanced thesis on how AI will transform, rather than simply threaten, our political systems…

Video: Bruce Schneier Talks AI, Trust, and the Power of Community with RSAC

  • RSA Conference
  • November 3, 2025

Watch the Video on YouTube

In this exclusive interview with RSAC’s Britta Glade, cybersecurity expert and author Bruce Schneier explores how artificial intelligence is reshaping the principles of confidentiality, fairness, and integrity. He also shares how the RSAC™ Membership Platform can help professionals stay connected, exchange real-time insights, and navigate the evolving landscape of AI and cybersecurity together.

Audio: AI for the Public Interest: Bruce Schneier

  • Future Hindsight
  • October 30, 2025

Listen to the Audio on Future Hindsight

We discuss how AI can both serve the public interest and advance the goals of our democracy, despite the misgivings about the current state of AI.

SRI Appoints Bruce Schneier as Visiting Senior Policy Fellow

‍Global security expert Bruce Schneier joins University of Toronto’s Munk School and the Schwartz Reisman Institute as a visiting fellow to tackle one of today’s defining questions: how can we build AI systems—and societies—that people can truly trust?

  • Schwartz Reisman Institute for Technology and Policy
  • October 28, 2025

Few thinkers have done more to reframe how we understand security in a networked world than Bruce Schneier. To him, security isn’t just about cryptography or code—it’s about trust, power, and the human choices embedded in every system we build.

For three decades, Schneier has asked what it really means to be secure, and who gets to decide. From designing cryptographic algorithms to writing bestselling books that redefined public conversations on privacy and power, the Harvard-based security expert has become one of the world’s most trusted interpreters of how technology shapes society…

Audio: Rewiring Democracy with Godfather of Cybersecurity and Public Interest Technologist, Bruce Schneier

  • Humans in the Loop
  • October 28, 2025

Listen to the Audio on Apple Podcasts or Spotify

This episode features an OG in the world of internet security, the Godfather of Cybersecurity, Bruce Schneier. Bruce describes himself as a public interest technologist, and has done many things under that banner—run companies, lectured at Harvard, testified before Congress, authored over a dozen books, and written a blog for over 20 years that has more than 250k regular readers—to name just a few.

Key topics:

  • The need for better technical minds in policy making
  • The implications of AI for democracy (not as bleak as you might expect…

Video: The Brian Kilmeade Show

  • Fox News Radio
  • October 24, 2025

Watch the Video on YouTube.com

Bruce Schneier appeared on Fox News Radio’s The Brian Kilmeade Show to talk about his new book, Rewiring Democracy: How AI Will Transform Our Politics, Government, and Citizenship. The interview starts at 49:20 in the video.

Tech Experts See Artificial Intelligence as a Key Resource Ahead of Local Elections

  • Maya Y. Fu, Helia M. Hung, and Adelaide L.D. Roger
  • The Harvard Crimson
  • October 23, 2025

Cambridge’s local elections are just around the corner—and scientists Bruce Schneier and Nathan E. Sanders said that artificial intelligence will be a critical tool to help inform voters before they head to the polls.

Schneier and Sanders, a Harvard Kennedy School lecturer, co-authored the book "Rewiring Democracy" that was released on Oct. 21. The two appeared at a Cambridge Public Library panel to share more about how citizens can use AI to get involved in politics on Wednesday evening.

They noted that Cambridge’s municipal elections on Nov. 4 are a prime opportunity for voters to use AI. With the most crowded field of candidates in recent memory, Schneier—a New York Times bestselling author—said the technology can be used to help summarize information about candidates…

Video: Book Talk—Rewiring Democracy: How AI Will Transform Our Politics, Government, and Citizenship

  • Harvard Ash Center
  • October 23, 2025

Watch the Video on YouTube.com

Bruce Schneier and Nathan E. Sanders gave a talk about their book Rewiring Democracy: How AI Will Transform Our Politics, Government, and Citizenship at the Harvard Ash Center. The discussion was moderated by Danielle Allen, James Bryant Conant University Professor and Director of the Allen Lab.

Computers, the internet, and artificial intelligence continue to reshape our society—but many democratic institutions have yet to adapt. In “Rewiring Democracy,” the authors illuminate both the promises and pitfalls of technology in contemporary democracy. Drawing on real-world examples and innovative projects, Schneier and Sanders propose practical reforms, showing how civic technologists and engaged citizens alike can help remake democracy for the digital age…

Rewiring Democracy (But Not Too Much)—a Book Review

  • Malcolm Murray
  • 3 Quarks Daily
  • October 17, 2025

I recently finished reading Rewiring Democracy: How AI Will Transform Our Politics, Government and Citizenship—a book by Bruce Schneier and Nathan Sanders on the effects of AI on democracy. It comes out soon (October 25). It is a good read, worth reading for its myriad examples of AI in action at all levels of the democratic system. Ultimately, though, it seems to be a missed opportunity, failing to engage with many potential larger ways in which AI might affect democracy.

The book’s strength lies in its meticulous and hyper-granular description of all the ways that AI might affect elements of a democratic society, from enabling citizen power, to assisting in court cases, to empowering politicians. It offers many examples of how AI has been, will be, or could be adopted, for good and for ill. It maintains an admirably balanced and neutral stance throughout, detailing both the ways AI can be used to empower individual citizens, as well as how it could empower powerful vested interests. It is thoroughly organized, with separate sections on politics, legislation, administration, citizen and courts, and a starting briefer describing the relevant AI capabilities for each before outlining use cases and providing examples. The book admirably outlines the need for Public AI—AI as a common infrastructure provided by government, akin to water and electricity…

Video: What AI Is Doing to Politics Is Way Wilder Than You Imagined

  • Worth Knowing with Matt Robison
  • October 17, 2025

Watch the Video on SubStack.com
Listen to the Audio on Spotify.com

If you’re like me, you’re pretty damn tired of all the breathless AI talk.

AI’s going to supercharge the economy! No, it’s going to destroy all our jobs! AI will endow us with enhanced intelligence and mind-melded cognitive powers!! No, it’s pulping our brains and killing our ability to think!!1 AI will design medicines that make us live forever!!! No, it’s going to turn on us like Skynet and eventually machines are going to shoot lasers at the last few human survivors from atop a pile of skulls!!! …

Review of Rewiring Democracy

  • Ben Shneiderman
  • Human-Centered AI Google Group
  • October 9, 2025

Bruce Schneier and Nathan Sanders have been working on Rewiring Democracy: How AI Will Transform Our Politics, Government, and Citizenship (The MIT Press, Oct. 21, 2025). Their broad-ranging review imagines the many ways AI will impact politicians, legislators, administrators, jurists, and citizens. Their example-packed analyses, with calls to action, are largely hope-filled, with comments such as: “Despite the fantasies of some, we don;t anticipate that AIs will replace the humans who perform these tasks anytime soon. Nonetheless, over time, we expect that AI will make civil servants more effective at their jobs, and democracy more responsive to its constituents. Administrators and policymakers need to ensure that these efficiencies make government serve people better and more equitably.” They believe that: “Security is the biggest major barrier to using AI in democratic applications that no one seems to be talking about.” In general, Schneier and Sanders expect positive outcomes from AI implementations, but wisely warn of dangers: “If our goal is to ensure that AI generally benefits democracy rather than harms it, then we have a lot of work to do.” Their forward-looking scenarios mean that they repeatedly use words like: could, should, must, and can. They close with 7 organizing principles, such as “AI tools must be made widely available” and “AI developers and tools must be transparent.” Then they offer 4 paths such as promoting “responsible use of AI in society” so that “we may just be able to use this technology to rewire democracy to better serve all of us.” Overall, a valuable, wise, and balanced contribution in non-technical terms that will be welcomed by the five communities they address, and I hope the researchers and developers who could produce the happier outcomes the authors seek…

Audio: Bruce Schneier: Rewiring Democracy

  • From Nowhere to Nothing
  • October 5, 2025

Listen to the Audio on PodBean.com

In this episode, we discuss Bruce Schneier and Nathan E. Sanders’s upcoming book,  Rewiring Democracy: How AI Will Transform Our Politics, Government, and Citizenship.

Video: Office Hours with David Meltzer

  • Office Hours with David Meltzer
  • October 2, 2025

Watch the Video on LinkedIn.com
Listen to the Audio on Podcasts.Apple.com

Bruce Schneier joined David Meltzer to discuss AI and Democracy.

Rewiring Democracy: Bruce Schneier and Nathan E. Sanders on AI, Power, and the Future of Governance

How will AI reshape democratic institutions and policymaking in the 21st century?

  • Scott Douglas Jacobsen
  • Good Men Project
  • September 25, 2025

Rewiring Democracy: How AI Will Transform Our Politics, Government, and Citizenship is Bruce Schneier and Nathan E. Sanders’ field guide to governing in the algorithmic age. Drawing on real projects and policy debates, it maps how AI is already reshaping lawmaking, regulation, courts, and civic participation—and shows how to bend the tech toward equity, transparency, and public accountability. Rather than dystopian panic or hype, the authors offer a pragmatic roadmap: reform and regulate AI, resist harmful deployments, responsibly use AI to improve services, and renovate democratic institutions so power is distributed, not concentrated. Publication: MIT Press, October 21, 2025, globally…

Audio: Bruce Schneier on AI as Democracy’s Power Magnifier

Artificial intelligence isn’t just a futuristic buzzword—it’s already reshaping politics, governance, and even citizenship.

  • Campaign Trend Podcast
  • September 25, 2025

Listen to the Audio on CampaignTrend.com

Artificial intelligence isn’t just a futuristic buzzword—it’s already reshaping politics, governance, and even citizenship. That’s the argument Bruce Schneier, one of the world’s foremost security technologists and author of the forthcoming Rewiring Democracy: How AI Will Transform Our Politics, Government, and Citizenship, makes in his conversation on the Campaign Trend Podcast.

Video: The Godfather of Security, Bruce Schneier, Rewires Democracy

Why America's Democracy Runs on 1776 Technology in a 2025 World and What To Do About It

  • Keen on America
  • September 11, 2025

Watch the Video on Substack.com

If Geoffrey Hinton is the Godfather of AI, then Bruce Schneier might be described as the Godfather of Security. A celebrated cryptographer and computer security expert, Schneier’s latest co-authored (with Nathan Sanders) book is entitled Rewiring Democracy and speculates on how AI might transform our politics, government and citizenship. American democracy, Schneier notes, runs on archaic 1776 technology in today’s digital 2025 world. Rather than fighting against AI then, he suggests, Americans should adapt this new technology to update how they do politics in the 21st century. But Schneier offers the crucial caveats that AI can neither solve fundamental human problems nor transcend ideology. “A value is just a bias we like,” he warns about the impossibility of a “valueless” AI system. While cautiously optimistic about AI’s potential to democratize power—from helping local politicians without resources to enabling mass citizen assemblies—he warns that without fixing underlying political and economic structures, AI will simply radically empower the already powerful. Trust the Godfather of Security on this one. AI might well turn out to be reassuringly less revolutionary than both its critics and supporters promise…

Video: Bruce Schneier Rewiring Democracy

  • Stand Up! with Pete Dominick
  • September 1, 2025

Listen to the Audio on Libsyn.com or Watch the Video on YouTube

Stand Up is a full length show featuring a comprehensive news recap and 2 guests almost everyday. We will talk about issues that matter to you, your health, the health of your family, community, country and planet. And we will try to laugh while we do it.

The conversation with Bruce Schneier begins about 33 minutes into the audio podcast. The video is just the interview.

Video: Sign in Code Red – The Politics and Perils of Cybersecurity in the 21st Century

  • The Geostrata
  • July 8, 2025

Watch the Video on YouTube

The digital revolution has transformed societies, economies and governance structures across the globe. Parallel to this transformation are a new set of challenges in terms of cybersecurity threats that are becoming increasingly complex, transitional and technologically sophisticated.

This also calls for an analysis of the implications of artificial intelligence in cyberattacks and how these developments are recalibrating traditional security paradigms. With the aim to explore the evolving tensions between individual privacy, collective security, and the push for government-mandated backdoors, this interview welcomes Mr. Bruce Schneier, a globally renowned authority on security technology and policy who brings unparalleled expertise to this conversation. His insights facilitate discussions on frameworks for integrating cybersecurity into national and international governance while generating action points for policymakers and industry leaders…

Schneier Tries to Rip the Rose-Colored AI Glasses from the Eyes of Congress

  • Thomas Claburn
  • The Register
  • June 11, 2025

Security guru Bruce Schneier played the skunk at the garden party in a Thursday federal hearing on AI’s use in the government, focusing on the risks many are ignoring.

“The other speakers mostly talked about how cool AI was—and sometimes about how cool their own company was—but I was asked by the Democrats to specifically talk about DOGE and the risks of exfiltrating our data from government agencies and feeding it into AIs,” Schneier explained in a blog post.

DOGE stands for the Department of Government Efficiency. It’s a White House initiative, run until recently by centi-billionaire Elon Musk, that has been rifling through government databases and ordering layoffs at various government agencies in the name of cost savings and efficiency. Its staff cuts have been so extensive that the Trump administration reportedly …

Harvard’s Schneier Gives Lawmakers a Tour Through DOGE-Driven AI Risks

  • Charlie Mitchell
  • Inside AI Policy
  • June 6, 2025

The Trump administration’s DOGE initiative to revamp federal systems and scale back the workforce has involved unvetted uses of artificial intelligence to comb through sensitive data and has exacerbated the government’s cybersecurity vulnerabilities, according to computer scientist, activist and Harvard Kennedy School lecturer Bruce Schneier.

“Data security breaches present significant dangers to everyone in the United States, from private citizens to corporations to government agencies to elected officials,” Schneier testified at a June 5 House Oversight hearing…

What Magic Johnson and Bruce Schneier Taught Us at RSAC 2025

  • Tom Spring
  • SC Media
  • May 5, 2025

At first glance, Bruce Schneier and Magic Johnson have about as much in common as a firewall and a fast break. But last week was the annual RSAC confab, where the agendas can read like someone spun a roulette wheel loaded with cyber policy, threat intel—and apparently, NBA legends.

Last Tuesday, Schneier delivered his keynote on “AI, Security, and Trust,” a cerebral clinic on why the tech world is barreling toward a cliff. On Wednesday, former Los Angeles Lakers point guard Earvin “Magic” Johnson took the stage with “The Art of the Assist,” where he served business wisdom with a side of charisma. It’s the kind of conference whiplash RSAC has perfected: one minute you’re deep in machine learning risk models, the next you’re in a standing ovation for a guy who redefined the no-look pass…

A Hacker’s Mind: How the Powerful Bend Society’s Rules, and How to Bend Them Back (2023) by Bruce Schneier

  • Sandip Dholakia
  • The Ohio State University Institute for Cybersecurity & Digital Trust
  • March 17, 2025

Bottom Line:

Hall of Fame Candidate; I recommend this nonfiction book for the Cybersecurity Canon Hall of Fame.

Review:

When we think of a hacker, we think of a person wearing a black hoodie with a skull logo on the front. That is because we associate hacking with criminals and technology. However, that is not always the case, according to Bruce Schneier. In his latest book, “A Hacker’s Mind: How the Powerful Bend Society’s Rules, and How to Bend Them Back,” the author, a seasoned security professional, defies this common notion. Schneier explains that hacking does not have to be associated only with technology and criminals. He explains that whenever we bend rules or find loopholes in the system, we are hacking the system…

DOGE Is Putting the Country’s Data and Computing Infrastructure at Risk, HKS Expert Argues

Cyber security expert Bruce Schneier worries that DOGE’s access to highly sensitive information is giving bad actors a chance to take advantage.

  • Harvard Kennedy School
  • February 19, 2025

Before the Trump administration took office, what has become known as DOGE, or the Department of Government Efficiency, was touted as a tool for injecting private sector efficiencies into the federal workforce. Under the leadership of Elon Musk, DOGE has taken an unexpectedly radical tack—it has initiated mass layoffs and the wholesale shuttering of federal offices and agencies, such as the U.S. Agency for International Development. Perhaps less visible are the effects of DOGE’s unprecedent access to many highly sensitive federal databases and payment tools. Bruce Schneier, a security technologist and lecturer at the Kennedy School, wrote about this for The Atlantic and Foreign Policy. We spoke with him to learn more about the risks to federal data…

Nearly 10 Years After Data and Goliath, Bruce Schneier Says: Privacy’s Still Screwed

“In 50 years, I think we'll view these business practices like we view sweatshops today”

  • Iain Thomson
  • The Register
  • February 15, 2025

It has been nearly a decade since famed cryptographer and privacy expert Bruce Schneier released the book Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World—an examination of how government agencies and tech giants exploit personal data. Today, his predictions feel eerily accurate.

At stake, he argued then, was a possibly irreversible loss of privacy, and the archiving of everything. As he wrote, science fiction author Charlie Stross described the situation as the “end of prehistory,” in that every facet of our lives would be on a computer somewhere and available to anyone who knew how to find them…

Video: The Social Responsibility of the Technologist

  • Peter Carr
  • January 27, 2025

Watch the Video on YouTube.com

Technologists have a responsibility to be aware of the impact of their activities. This discussion with Bruce Schneier considers artificial intelligence and democracy, cybersecurity, modern warfare, government data leaks and the internet of things, along with Bruce’s belief that a hacker’s mindset will help people better understand their lives and the world today.

“Have a Good Bullshit Detector,” Advises Computer Security Expert Bruce Schneier

Cyberspace seems more insecure than it has for a long time. In an interview, security guru Bruce Schneier proposes a radical solution: Top-tier managers should have to go to prison if they fail to protect their company networks against hacker attacks.

  • Marie-Astrid Langer
  • NZZ
  • January 10, 2025

Summary

  • Bruce Schneier, security expert, says improved defense measures against cyberattacks are urgently needed.
  • Quantum computers do not pose a fundamental threat to cryptosecurity, Schneier says, but cryptographic agility will be important.
  • The main problems in the field of cybersecurity are economic and regulatory, he says, rather than technological shortcomings.

Cybersecurity is facing a tough challenge. Hospitals, schools and companies are constantly falling victim to ransomware attacks. Criminals are draining life savings from unsuspecting citizens through “pig-butchering” attacks. Even American government systems do not seem immune to hackers—Chinese attackers recently penetrated the largest telecommunications networks in the U.S. and …

Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.