News in the Category "Text"
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Don't Look Now, but Our Smart Machines May Be Sharing Data about You with… Anyone
We are entering a new era of Internet connectivity — the Internet of Things. Suddenly our devices are much more than just the computers we can hold in our laps.
These new devices collect information and make decisions on their own. What does this mean for us?
Bruce Schneier, an author and security technologist who has written several articles about the darker side of the Internet of Things, describes the new situation this way:
“The Internet of yesterday was the Internet of the things we typed into it. It was Facebook. It was text messages. It was a lot of data, but it was data that we gave it. Now the Internet is starting to look around for itself,” he says.
Schneier says the Internet of Things has a set of eyes and ears that it never had before. And this raises troubling questions about privacy and security. …
TrustyCon 2014: NSA Surveillance "a Benign Enemy," Says Bruce Schneier
Reuters Technology reporter Joseph Menn interviewed security expert Bruce Schneier in front of last week's TrustyCon audience in San Francisco, where the security expert provided his analysis of the government surveillance controversy
Bruce Schneier has been a vocal critic of the mass surveillance being conducted by the NSA and GCHQ. The security expert recently left his post at BT and joined the board of digital rights firm Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), one of TrustyCon’s organizers. Although several of TrustyCon’s speakers were part of the group who withdrew from their speaking commitments at last week’s RSA Conference, Schneier was featured on the agenda at both events.
Schneier said that the NSA’s surveillance capabilities are far and away the most advanced in the world, but not necessarily the most skilled. What the Snowden documents have provided are a window into what’s going on at the NSA, he added, “but they are the same sorts of things that any well-funded government is doing – Israel, China, France, and anyone with a budget. It just so happens that the US has the largest budget.”…
Q&A: Schneier on Trust, NSA Spying and the End of US Internet Hegemony
Bruce Schneier is the man who literally wrote the book on modern encryption, publishing Applied Cryptography in 1994, and for the past 20 years has been an important and sometimes outspoken voice in the security industry.
He founded the firm Counterpane Internet Security (later sold to BT), and is also a board member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and an Advisory Board Member of the Electronic Privacy Information Center.
More recently he’s been working on documents released by Edward Snowden on NSA activities and presented his findings at this year’s RSA conference in San Francisco. …
RSAC: Defeating NSA Surveillance Isn't the Real Problem
When Bruce Schneier went on to a different stage at the RSA Conference, resplendent in a purple floral shirt, he gave a very different presentation than an earlier panel from Washington intelligence insiders. Schneier, the CTO of Co3 Systems and author, gave the security-geek view. He also gave his answer to the question everyone has been asking: how do we keep from being spied on?
Collect Everything
Schneier laid out the situation as he sees it today: that the NSA has turned the Internet into a giant surveillance platform that is both technically and legally robust. “Fundamentally, the NSA’s mission is to collect everything,” said Schneier, tracing this view to the US’s “voyeuristic” interest in the USSR during the Cold War…
The NSA is "Not Made of Magic"
Of the small pool of people who have seen the Snowden documents, few, if any, are as technically savvy and knowledgeable about security and surveillance as Bruce Schneier. And after reading through stacks and stacks of them, Schneier says that yes, the NSA is extremely capable and full of smart people but “they are not made of magic”.
A cryptographer by training and a security thinker by trade, Schneier has spent many hours reading the Snowden documents and thinking about what they mean, both in terms of the NSA’s actual capabilities and their effect on data security and privacy. Much of the news, clearly, is not good on that front. The NSA has a dual mission: to protect the communications infrastructure of the United States and to eavesdrop on the communications of foreign nations The agency, Schneier said, is very, very good at both of those missions, but it’s the eavesdropping piece that has grown exponentially in recent years as the Internet and mobile devices have became pervasive…
Schneier: NSA Snooping Tactics Will Be Copied by Criminals in 3 to 5 Years
The good news? Strong crypto still works
RSA 2014 If you thought NSA snooping was bad, you ain’t seen nothing yet: online criminals have also been watching and should soon be able to copy the agency’s invasive surveillance tactics, according to security guru Bruce Schneier.
“The NSA techniques give about a three to five year lead on what cyber-criminals will do,” he told an audience at the RSA 2014 conference in San Francisco.
“These techniques for exfiltrating data aren’t magical, they are just expensive. Everything we know about technology is that it gets cheaper. So the notion of putting up a fake cell tower or wireless access point, of jumping air gaps, you’re going to see this stuff—it’s really just a matter of time.”…
Are Apple iOS, OS X Flaws Really Backdoors for Spies?
Two recently-discovered flaws in Apple iOS and Mac OS X have security experts openly asking whether the software vulnerabilities represent backdoors inserted for purposes of cyber-espionage. There’s no clear answer so far, but it just shows that anxiety about state-sponsored surveillance is running high.
‘One line of code—was it an accident or enemy action? I don’t know, but it’s the kind of bug I’d put in,’ remarked Bruce Schneier, chief technology officer at Co3 Systems, about the flaw in Apple OS X SSL encryption that was revealed last week. Schneier, a cryptography expert, alluded to the …
RSA 2014: Bruce Schneier Champions Encryption in 'Golden Age' of Government Surveillance
Cryptography expert Bruce Schneier, now CTO of Co3 Systems, continued his criticism of the National Security Agency's surveillance during his well-attended talk at the RSA Conference in San Francisco today.
Schneier has been a fierce critic of the National Security Agency (NSA) ever since the details of this surveillance were first revealed by former CIA contractor Edward Snowden last summer. And following on from an interview with CNN this week where he argued for the NSA to be split up, he took the opportunity to champion for stronger encryption in front of a packed audience at the RSA Conference.
Schneier, who left BT—also reportedly offering back doors in products—to join Co3 Systems in December, mused from the beginning that the talk was going to be a prickly and hotly-contested subject. “This will be a fun topic.”…
RSA 2014: Bruce Schneier—Privacy Has Not Been Lost To The NSA
Don't feel futile, the Internet can be saved, according to cryptography luminary
There are ways for people to win back their privacy from global intelligence agencies, largely by making bulk collection of data economically unviable, encryption luminary Bruce Schneier told delegates at the RSA 2014 conference today.
This would be doable by placing secure encryption in places where it currently does not reside, from vulnerable mobile applications to people’s hard drives.
“Encryption frustrates the NSA at scale,” he said. “Our goal should be to leverage economics, physics and maths to make the Internet secure, to make surveillance more expensive…
What's Bruce Schneier Doing at Co3?
When incident response software maker Co3 announced earlier this month that Bruce Schneier was joining the company as its first CTO, some observers might have wondered: Huh?
Why would an internationally known thinker on security issues leave a gig as chief security technology officer at a large telecom like BT to serve as CTO of a much smaller software company? Well, the answer is pretty basic. He sees the company offering a product the security and privacy communities desperately need.
“What I see of value is a way to coordinate incident response, which is lacking,” he said in an interview with …
Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.