Schneier on Security

Bruce Schneier has built a career explaining the principles of security in plain English, helping the uninitiated to think clearly and critically about managing risk, and exposing the nonsense peddled by government spokesmen and high-tech hucksters. He is at once a great popularizer and a great debunker.

Schneier’s new book, Data and Goliath, examines the prevalence, mechanisms, uses, and dangers of mass surveillance.

This book scared the hell out of me.

That doesn’t happen very often. Having spent 20 years writing about political repression, police brutality, counterinsurgency, and torture, I’ve come to expect the worst as a matter of habit. Schneier’s book, however, shows that the present state of mass surveillance—its scale, intrusiveness, and implications—surpasses what I could have imagined. It was not the big stuff, like the National Security Agency’s goal of total global omniscience (epitomized in the slogan ‘Collect it all’), but the smaller details that gave me chills. ‘It’s less Big Brother,’ Schneier writes, ‘and more hundreds of tattletale little brothers.’…