News in the Category "Text"
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Rolling Back Mass Surveillance
Bruce Schneier is a man worth listening to. In 1993, just as the Internet was gaining speed, he wrote one of the earliest books on applying cryptography to network communications, and has since become a well-known security specialist and author of about a dozen books on Internet security and related matters. So when someone like Schneier says we’re in big trouble and we need to do something fast to keep it from getting worse, we should at least pay attention.
The trouble is mass surveillance. In his latest book, Data and Goliath, he explains that mass surveillance is the practice of indiscriminately collecting giant data banks of information on people first, and then deciding what you can do with it. One of the best-known and most controversial examples of this is the practice of the U. S. National Security Agency (NSA) of grabbing telecommunications metadata (basically, who called whom when) covering the entire U. S., which was revealed when Edward Snowden made his stolen NSA files public in 2013. Advocates of the NSA defend the call database by saying the content of the calls is not monitored, only the fact that they were made. But Schneier makes short work of that argument in a few well-chosen examples showing that such metadata can easily reveal extremely private facts about a person: medical conditions or sexual orientation, for example…
Data Privacy, One of These Days
For some odd reason, data privacy maven Bruce Schneier is an optimist. It’s odd because, according to Schneier, there’s practically no such thing as data privacy. Just about everything we do these days is under some form of electronic surveillance, with governments and corporations eager to record and analyze our every action.
But when Schneier holds forth on Friday at Harvard University, as part of the ongoing HUBweek festivities, he’ll reassure his listeners that the cause is not lost, that our online privacy will someday be ensured. Just give it a decade or two…
Read: Data and Goliath
This just happened. Oops.
If you read this book I want you to focus on the pickle. It’s a book about big data, surveillance and freedom vs convenience, but I want you thinking like this book is one of those MASSIVE corned beef sandwiches you get in New York. You know the ones where the slices of bread look like postage stamps under a virtual mountain of charred, savory flesh. The sandwich is the key but the pickle should not ever be forgotten because often times is the last thing you taste. Bruce Schneier’s book on big data is something that EVERY American over the age of, well, reading age, should read. Will they? No. Why? Because for some reason many Americans don’t seem to care about much of this. At least until something happens to them, at which time they turn around and try to explain what happened to an audience who…just…doesn’t…care. I did my own little …
Q&A with Bruce Schneier: What if Your Law Firm Is the Next Ashley Madison?
If the subject is security, chances are Bruce Schneier has an opinion on it, and that opinion has been published somewhere—on his blog, in the New York Times, on the BBC, in the Guardian, in Wired, in one of his 13 books. You get the point. On security, Schneier is among the most well-known and most prolific authorities in the world. Since coming to prominence in the mid-90s through his writings on cryptography, he has testified on the floor of Congress, served on several government committees, coined the term ‘security theater’ in the wake of 9/11, and hooked a global following of some quarter-million readers through his website and …
Data and Goliath by Bruce Schneier (Book Review)
Excerpt
Data and Goliath is a fascinating exploration of this post-Snowden world we live in. It shows how the back-doors that technology companies were forced to implement for the NSA, have actually become weapons for other agencies and hackers to use. We’re taken through the murky world of international espionage, and shown how we have all become collateral damage in this digital arms race. Schneier also explains that even when we try to protect ourselves by leaving Facebook or Gmail, the fact that our friends and relatives still use them means we’re caught up in this global informational dragnet…
"A Lot of Attacks from Western Countries Go through China," Says Bruce Schneier
The attack on Sony Pictures over the film The Interview was perpetrated by North Korea, according to security expert Bruce Schneier.
The former chief technology officer of BT Managed Security Solutions, now CTO at Resilient Systems, had expressed scepticism at the time of the attack that the secretive dictatorship had been behind the attack, motivated by the theme of the film: two hapless American agents who were supposed to assassinate the country’s leader, Kim Jong-un.
But in a video keynote speech at LinuxCon 2015, Schneier claimed that he had changed his mind. “Many of us, including myself, were skeptical for several months. By now it does seem obvious that it was North Korea, as amazing as that sounds,” he said…
Bruce Schneier: The Cyberwar Arms Race Is On
Security expert says we're in a cyberwar arms race, and with the Sony attack, North Korea has already taken the first shot at the United States.
LinuxCon is about Linux, cloud, and containers, but it’s also about security. In the past year, programmers have been reminded that merely being “open-source” doesn’t mean that your code is safe. Assuming you’re secure is a mistake. Because, as security maven Bruce Schneier explained to the LinuxCon audience via Google Hangouts, we’re in a cyber-arms race.
In particular Schneier focused on last fall’s Sony cyber attack. At the time, Schneier said that when the FBI said North Korea was behind the attack, he didn’t believe them. Now, he does.
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Bruce Schneier: "We're in Early Years of a Cyber Arms Race"
Security guru Bruce Schneier says there’s a kind of cold war now being waged in cyberspace, only the trouble is we don’t always know who we’re waging it against.
Schneier appeared onscreen via Google Hangouts at the LinuxCon/CloudOpen/ContainerCon conference in Seattle on Tuesday to warn attendees that the modern security landscape is becoming increasingly complex and dangerous.
"We know, on the internet today, that attackers have the advantage," Schneier said. "A sufficiently funded, skilled, motivated adversary will get in. And we have to figure out how to deal with that."…
The New America: Little Privacy, Big Terror
Excerpt
In Data and Goliath, Bruce Schneier, a security technologist and fellow at Harvard Law School, explores what it means to have entered the age of mass surveillance. Our data are collected in the first instance by private corporations, but are increasingly exploited, as Edward Snowden has shown, by government intelligence agencies. The NSA didn’t have to build from scratch a vast database on billions of innocent citizens the world over, Schneier explains, because private corporations had already done so. All the NSA needed was access.
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Bruce Schneier on Security Metrics that Matter
“I like to measure the performance of the team,” said Bruce Schneier (@schneierblog), CTO of Resilient Systems, Inc., in our conversation at the 2015 Black Hat Conference in Las Vegas. “I like to see metrics about people, about process, about technology. There isn’t one metric that works since it’s such a complicated and moving target… Right now companies have to use the data that they have to figure out if their teams are effective.”
Schneier feels that certain metrics, such as blocked attacks, don’t really provide a gauge of how secure you are…
Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.