News in the Category "Data and Goliath"
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Bruce Schneier's Data and Goliath—Solution or Part of the Problem?
Think of some of the ways the Enlightenment helped advance the human individual. The ability to shape your identity. The ability to own and control your stuff. Economic autonomy. All three help to define the modern world, they’re ways we know that “now” is not like “before”. All three are founded on the sanctity of the individual. And all three are interlinked.
For example, our identity means little if you can’t express it creatively, by protecting your inventions and creations, and having some say over their use. You don’t have economic autonomy if an individual cannot negotiate what spoils come from exploiting the value of their work. Privacy is built on the same respect, and it’s a more modern and much more culturally specific—laws and norms come from what societies think and feel about the individual. Japanese and Chinese views on privacy are as different as German and American ideas are different…
Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World (Review)
“We may not like to admit it, but we are under mass surveillance.” So says Bruce Schneier, in his book Data and Goliath, for a popular audience. Schneier is a well-known writer in cryptography, and more recently a public figure in discussions of computer and network security.
The first fifth of Data and Goliath establishes his thesis: we are entering a world of ubiquitous surveillance, by both governments and businesses. He presents numerous anecdotes and stories, many from the Snowden documents (where we learned of the many forms of electronic data collection used by the NSA) and others from the popular press (e.g., the family that found out about their daughter’s pregnancy by the targeted advertising she was receiving). The second fifth explains what is at stake: limits to our freedom of expression (for fear of being attacked with our own secrets), chilling effects on expressions of dissent, discrimination in commercial dealings, as well as a host of abuses. For example, the backdoor built by Ericsson into Vodafone products to support legal wiretaps was abused by unknown third parties in 2004 and 2005 to wiretap members of the Greek government. But surveillance is not all bad: the phone company needs to monitor the location of your mobile phone to direct calls to you…
Book Review: Data and Goliath (Bruce Schneier)
I finally got around to finishing Bruce Schneier’s latest bestseller: Data and Goliath. I’ve read a few of Bruce’s books over the years (and own most of the rest, waiting patiently to be read). I’ve watched Bruce on many TV news segments, lectures, interviews, and web videos. I follow his blog and Twitter posts. I’ve even had the pleasure of emailing him from time to time. Some day I’d love to meet the guy. So… what I’m trying to say here is: fair warning, I’m a bit of a Bruce Schneier fan boy.
However, I feel this is completely justified. I tend to have the most respect for the even-keeled, professorial types—the ones who are passionate about what they do and highly knowledgeable about their field, but at the end of the day are most concerned with getting it right and avoiding hyperbole. That’s a small camp of people, but Bruce is definitely in it…
Review of Data and Goliath
The Internet birthed unprecedented freedom of communication, interconnecting individuals from every corner of the globe and every walk of life. This free flow of information has the potential to establish a world of truly free and equal citizens, yet many politicians want to turn this technology inside out and use the Internet as a universal surveillance mechanism. This path would roll back centuries of civil rights and revive feudalism on a global scale. Sadly, this rush to oppression isn’t restricted to some backwater dictator massaging his own ego. The most powerful nations on earth are violating their own laws to continuously develop new and more invasive methods of scrutinizing everyone they can reach…
Ced Kurtz’s Techman Texts: Computer Surveillance Is a Trade-off
Bruce Schneier is a world-renowned cryptographer, computer security and privacy specialist, and author of numerous books on security. So when he speaks, TechMan tends to listen.
In his latest book, “Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World,” his point is well worth taking note of: Surveillance and data collections are a trade-off between individual value and group value. You give Google personal information in return for free search, free email, free maps and all the other free things Google provides…
The Ends of Privacy
“Over the past twenty years,” complained Newsweek, the United States has become “one of the snoopiest and most data-conscious nations in the history of the world.” Part of the problem is that “the average American trails data behind him like spoor through the length of his life.” Another part of the problem is that the government and private firms “have been chasing down, storing, and putting to use every scrap of information they can find.” These “vast reservoirs of personal information” are “poured into huge computers” and “swapped with mountains of other data from other sources” with “miraculous speed and capacity.” As a result of these forces, “Americans have begun to surrender both the sense and the reality of their own right to privacy—and their reaction to their loss has been slow and piecemeal.”…
Collecting Private Information
A computer-security expert weighs up the costs and benefits of collecting masses of personal data
Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World. By Bruce Schneier.W.W. Norton; 383 pages; $27.95 and £17.99.
SOCIETY has more digital information than ever and can do new things with it. Google can identify flu outbreaks using search queries; America’s National Security Agency (NSA) aspires to do the same to find terrorists. But at the same time people are under constant surveillance by companies and governments, since the rules protecting privacy are hopelessly out of date.
In “Data and Goliath” Bruce Schneier, a computer-security expert, does a fine job of laying out the problems caused by this compulsive collection of personal data, and suggests some steps that would help protect society from the most egregious excesses. The challenges are severe because modern technologies collect large amounts of information on the most innocuous of activities, which formerly left no data trace…
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…
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…
Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.