Schneier on Security

GrowthPolicy. In a recent opinion piece in the New York Times, you write: “American democracy is an information system, in which the information isn’t bits and bytes but citizens’ beliefs. […] When you really need to worry is when insiders go bad. And that is precisely what is happening in the wake of the 2020 presidential election.” What advice would you offer policy makers seeking to safeguard future elections from disinformation campaigns undertaken by bad inside actors?

Bruce Schneier: We need to break up the tech monopolies. Companies like Amazon, Facebook, and Google wield enormous power in the market, and by extension in politics. Decentralization brings security, and the world would be much safer if there were twenty smaller Amazons and Facebooks and Googles than one of each. So we need both smaller companies and the ability to move, delete, combine, and reuse data from a variety of companies. Enforcing existing antitrust laws will make an enormous difference in how these companies affect society. And in areas where decentralization doesn’t make sense—when we have natural monopolies—we need to treat them like the utilities they are…