News in the Category "Articles"
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Schneier: Internet Has Delivered a "Golden Age of Surveillance"
“Information is power,” has been true for so long that it has become a cliché.
But the Internet has increased the power to collect, store and analyze information by such an order of magnitude that we are now in what Bruce Schneier called “the golden age of surveillance,” in his keynote address Wednesday morning at SOURCE Boston.
That would be golden for those doing the surveillance, not the subjects of it.
Schneier, author, security guru, blogger and CTO of Co3 Systems, said the expectation that the Internet would mainly empower the powerless—grassroots groups, hackers, minorities and other relatively fringe groups—did come true for a number of years. But governments around the world have now caught up, he said. And they are better prepared to use power than small, disparate groups…
Surveillance is the Business Model of the Internet: Bruce Schneier
Data is a natural consequence of computing, and as search tools get better, it shifts the balance of power towards mass collection and surveillance, renowned security expert Bruce Schneier said at the SOURCE Boston conference on Wednesday.
“Surveillance is the business model of the Internet,” Schneier told attendees. “We build systems that spy on people in exchange for services. Corporations call it marketing.”
The data economy—the growth of mass data collection and tracking—is changing how power is perceived, Schneier said in his keynote speech. The Internet and technology has changed the impact a group can have on others, where dissidents can use the Internet to amplify their voices and extend their reach. Governments already have a lot of power to begin with, so when they take advantage of technology, their power is magnified, he said…
Bruce Schneier: Technology Magnifies Power in Surveillance Era
BOSTON—History is not entirely kind to those responsible for the Industrial Age in the 19th century. How, for example, were the consequences of industrial innovation such as pollution largely ignored?
Flash forward to today’s digital age and ask the same question: How are those responsible for building our infrastructure callously disregarding privacy and security in favor of rapid online innovation?
“I think this is the issue by which we will be judged when our grandchildren read the history of the early days of the Internet,” said Bruce Schneier today during his Source Boston keynote…
Glenn Greenwald's Encryption Guru
Bruce Schneier says the key to good security is accepting that perfect security doesn’t exist.
Last fall, not long after Bruce Schneier quietly revealed himself as the cryptographer who had helped journalist Glenn Greenwald review Edward Snowden’s NSA documents, he found himself on CNN International, talking about allegations that the United States had spied on the chancellor of Germany.
An exasperated host beamed Schneier in from Minneapolis, where he lives, and asked him to “help us,” as she put it, “decipher this enigma.” Schneier is a legendary encryption specialist who has written or edited 13 books on the subject, and worked for the Department of Defense, telecommunications companies, banks and governments. Most recently, he’s been a vocal advocate of the idea that the best security systems accept a reasonable amount of risk; a blind focus on protecting against every threat, he says, usually comes with unexpected costs…
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.”…
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 …
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.”…
Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.