News in the Category "Text"
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Schneier: Make Wide-Scale Surveillance Too Expensive
Lessons from NSA revelations hit at heart of the "fundamental issue of the information age," says Bruce Schneier
Other articles about the IETF plenary session appeared in MIT Technology Review, Intellectual Property Watch, and The Economist, and Help Net Security.
As custodians of the Internet mull over the lessons that revelations about National Security Agency (NSA) surveillance offer about the insecurity of the Internet’s infrastructure, architects must find ways to make wholesale spying more expensive. So said noted cryptographer and security evangelist Bruce Schneier in a talk today about Internet hardening at the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) plenary session…
Former DHS/NSA Official Attacks Bruce Schneier With Bizarre, Factually Incorrect, Nonsensical Rant
Excerpt
Over the years, at times, I’ve seen people criticize Bruce Schneier for perhaps getting more publicity than other security researchers, but it’s rare to see people question his knowledge. The complaints often appear to stem more out of jealousy than anything else. But, I’ve never seen anything quite as ridiculous as this “CNN iReport” by Richard Marshall and Andre Brisson, which appears to be a blatant hatchet job attack on Schneier that is at times incomprehensible, at times factually incorrect and bizarre throughout. Marshall is a former NSA and DHS “cybersecurity” expert, but he’s now the CEO of “Whitenoise Labs,” (something …
NSA and the Murky Relationship Between Contractors, Government Secrets and Journalism
Excerpt
National Security Agency Director Gen. Keith Alexander this week defended the private sector’s cooperation with the agency’s electronic surveillance programs, telling Congress the companies involved are being punished in the media for meeting legal obligations under U.S. law and helping to save lives.
‘We have compelled industry to help us…by court order,’ said Alexander, during testimony Oct. 29 before the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. ‘And what they’re doing is saving lives’ in the U.S. and around the world. ‘And it’s the right thing to do,’ Alexander said…
Liars and Outliers Review
I’ve just finished reading Liars and Outliers by Bruce Schneier. I received a signed copy thanks to Schneier’s discounted signed book offer of $11 plus a review. So here’s a review:
In this book, Schneier takes on all of security: What is it, and why does it work? The answer flows through diverse areas of study, from evolutionary psychology to game theory. He begins (appropriately enough) with history; a discussion of predators and prey. From microbiology, we move rapidly forward through time to modern society.
After taking a look at history, Schneier moves into a discussion of the four societal pressures: moral, reputational, institutional, and security. Each kind of pressure is built off of the previous ones, with security being the most advanced…
Applied Cryptography by Bruce Schneier
This is the next entry in the series of Russ reading books that he bought years ago and never got around to reading. Thankfully, this time, the book has aged somewhat better.
This review is for the second edition of Applied Cryptography, published in 1996. Given how important computer security has become, and how central cryptography is to computer security, one might think that the passage of 17 years would make a book effectively obsolete. This turns out not to be the case. Yes, Rijndael (the current AES standard and the most widely-used block cipher), Camellia (the up-and-comer in the block cipher world), and the SHA-2 hash postdate this book and aren’t discussed. Yes, there have been some further developments in elliptic-curve public-key cryptography. And yes, much of the political information in this book, as well as the patent situation for public-key cryptosystems, is now mostly of historical interest. But a surprising amount of this book still applies directly…
Audio: NSA is Wasteful and Dangerous
During a podcast on Occupy Radio, the host and a renowned security expert Bruce Schneier get to discuss the NSA practices in terms of treating citizen privacy and other related issues.
Listen to the Audio on Archive.org
– Bruce Schneier is an internationally recognized expert on cryptography and data security. He was dubbed a ‘Security Guru’ by the Economist magazine. His most recent book is ‘Liars and Outliers: Enabling the Trust that Society Needs to Thrive’. Bruce’s newsletter, Cryptogram, and his blog Schneier on Security are read by over a quarter of a million people. Thank you, Bruce, for joining me on Occupy Radio.
– Hey, thanks for having me.
– My pleasure. I have been looking forward to this interview. We’ve been talking about talking for about a couple of weeks now, and you seem like the guy to educate me on what the heck is going on with NSA and Snowden, and Prism, and all of these things that seem to have just opened up before as lately. That seems to be your daily whack, right?…
Bruce Schneier: NSA Spying Is Making Us Less Safe
The security researcher Bruce Schneier, who is now helping the Guardian newspaper review Snowden documents, suggests that more revelations are on the way.
Bruce Schneier, a cryptographer and author on security topics, last month took on a side gig: helping the Guardian newspaper pore through documents purloined from the U.S. National Security Agency by contractor Edward Snowden, lately of Moscow.
In recent months that newspaper and other media have issued a steady stream of revelations, including the vast scale at which the NSA accesses major cloud platforms, taps calls and text messages of wireless carriers, and tries to subvert encryption.
This year Schneier is also a fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society. In a conversation there with David Talbot, chief correspondent of …
Five More Questions: Privacy Expert Bruce Schneier Sees Outdated Data Laws Benefiting Feds, Businesses
Editor’s note: Five More Questions is an occasional series by Brian Lambert that follows up on people who recently made news.
Bruce Schneier has carved out an interesting niche for himself.
The southwest Minneapolis resident has become one, if not the best-known, of credible voices on the topics of privacy and security, personal and otherwise. His thinking on matters from Edward Snowden and the NSA to the nexus of government and corporate data-mining has made him a regular presence on The Atlantic, Forbes, Foreign Policy, Bloomberg and Guardian websites…
If Bruce Schneier Ran the NSA, He'd Ask a Basic Question: "Does It Do Any Good?"
Ars asks a tech and legal all-star team how to fix America's security state.
Excerpt
For the last two months, we’ve all watched the news about the National Security Agency and its friends over at the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC), which approves secret orders on behalf of the NSA and other spy agencies. But more often than not, a lot of these articles take the same basic structure: documents provided by NSA leaker Edward Snowden show X, and then privacy advocates and civil libertarians decry X for Y reason.
That now raises the question, what would these privacy advocates do if they were put in charge of the NSA and the FISC? Or more specifically, what changes would they immediately enact at those two opaque institutions?…
The 25 Best Bloggers, 2013 Edition
Excerpt
Technology expert Bruce Schneier has been blogging about security since 2004. If the subject was ever a niche, those days are long gone. His work touches on vital issues of safety and privacy at home, out in the world and, of course, on computers and other gadgets. Many of his posts simply point you towards items elsewhere—and he’s so important a figure in his field that the mere fact that Bruce Schneier found an article to be worthwhile is a significant endorsement.
Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.