News in the Category "Text"
Page 22 of 64
Review: Choking on Digital Exhaust
Mass surveillance by governments and corporations is comparable to child labor or environmental pollution. That is the largely persuasive claim of security expert Bruce Schneier in his new book “Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World.” Resistance is not futile, Schneier thinks, although it will be tricky to fight overreaching securocrats and snooping online advertisers without giving up at least some of the genuine advantages of Big Data.
Much of the problem lies in excessive expectations about what mass surveillance can achieve, writes Schneier, who is chief technology officer at security firm Resilient Systems and a fellow at Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society. It might seem that the combination of huge amounts of collected data and sophisticated data-mining could have prevented the 9/11 attacks or the Boston Marathon bombing. But Schneier says this approach is both very expensive and downright ineffective…
Under the Volcano With Bruce Schneier
I’m in a locked room, underneath a volcano somewhere in the southern hemisphere talking to one of the world’s leading security experts, Bruce Schneier. We’re discussing the NSA, squid, Edward Snowden, Chuck Norris, and what parents should really be worrying about when their kids go online. His new book, “Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Capture Your Data and Control Your World” is picking up rave reviews.
GeekDad: Bruce, please tell us who you are in fourteen words.
Schneier: Security technologist. Speaker, author, researcher. Security and privacy advocate. Anti-fear. Meta meta meta guy…
Fixing the Surveillance-Industrial Complex
A couple of weeks ago, I mentioned that I was reading Bruce Schneier’s new book, Data and Goliath, just published by Norton. The subtitle (which, as is the custom these days, is more or less an elevator pitch for the book) provides a hint of what’s inside: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World. What’s missing from this descriptive subtitle is the best part: And Here’s How We Can Fix It. Because unlike a lot of books that focus on big scary issues, this one has lots of concrete recommendations and encouragement to think that we can actually make change happen…
Schneier, Bruce. Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Capture Your Data and Control Your World
Focusing on the tension between surveillance and personal privacy, Schneier (Berkman Center for Internet and Society, Harvard Law School) notes that though surveillance has been practiced throughout history, it has become far more intrusive with the advent of computers, tablets, cell phones, and the Internet. Various entities practice surveillance, but the primary ones are governments and corporations. The book is in three parts. The first, “The World We’re Creating,” describes the data individuals generate, how it is gathered by surveillance, how it is used by corporations for advertising and other purposes, and what governments do with it. Part 2, “What’s at Stake,” addresses the harm all this surveillance does and how it impacts individual privacy. The final part, “What to Do about It,” which discusses how people can protect themselves, includes recommendations for dealing with governments and corporations and guidance about individual initiatives one should take. In making his case, Schneier cites numerous examples, many from Edward Snowden’s revelations. In a notes section, the author references and amplifies on his citations. This informative, easy-to-understand book will appeal to a broad readership. Summing Up: *** Highly recommended. All readers.—E. M. Aupperle, emeritus, University of Michigan…
Data and Goliath, Book Review: A Handbook for the Information Age
Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World By Bruce Schneier Norton 384 pages ISBN 978-0-393-24481-6 $27.95
We did not exactly know the trade-offs we would be making in 2015 when we first began using email or got our first mobile phones. If anyone had asked 15 years ago whether we wanted a device that enabled governments and corporations to monitor our whereabouts and access the details of our personal, business, and social lives at all times, it’s pretty clear that almost everyone would have said ‘no’…
David and Goliath: What Do We Do about Surveillance?
From spyware designed to catch students misbehaving to police tracking rioters by phone, we are spied on as never before, reveals a book by Bruce Schneier
“DEAR subscriber, you have been registered as a participant in a mass disturbance.” This text was sent by the Ukrainian government last year to everyone with a cellphone known to have been near a protest in the capital, Kiev.
Just what you’d expect from an ex-Soviet country? Not so fast. In the US and Europe, police are also seeking information on phones linked to specific places and times—and always without a warrant. We’re all spied on. Our phones are bugged, our laptops inveterate informants. Reports on activities that define you—where you go, who you meet, what you buy—are sold to the highest bidder. But do we notice? And do we care?…
Bruce Schneier Talks Privacy, Politics, Books and More
As author of a dozen books plus hundreds of shorter works on security and privacy, security technologist Bruce Schneier, Chief Technology Officer of Resilient Systems, is one of the better known—and frequently quoted—experts in these areas. His "Schneier on Security" blog and Crypto-Gram monthly newsletter are read by an estimated quarter-million people. You can follow him on Twitter @schneierblog.
Schneier’s most recent book—a New York Times bestseller—is "Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World", which, Schneier said in his blog, "is a book about surveillance, both government and corporate. It’s an exploration in three parts: what’s happening, why it matters, and what to do about it."…
The Essential Guide To Digital Life: Bruce Schneier’s Data And Goliath
If you’d asked me a year ago, ‘do you worry about government surveillance?’, I would have said no. But today, my answer would be an empathic YES.
The scary part is that, like most Canadians, I hadn’t worried about that kind of surveillance until the current debate around C-51. (If you don’t know what that is, check it out here.) This terrifying bill would, among many other things, make it illegal to talk positively of terrorism on the internet. Just look at the news in Canada on any day lately, and you’ll see a report or an opinion on it. I personally like …
Wanted: Slingshots
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.’…
"We the People Have a Lot of Work to Do" Says Schneier in a Must-Read Book on Security and Privacy
“The surveillance society snuck up on us,” says Bruce Schneier in Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Capture Your Data and Control Your World. It’s a thought-provoking, absorbing, and comprehensive guide to our new big data world. Most important, it’s a call for a serious discussion and urgent action to stop the harms caused by the mass collection and mining of data by governments and corporations. To paraphrase Schneier’s position on anonymity—we either need to develop more robust techniques for preserving our freedom, or give up on the idea entirely…
Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.