News in the Category "Data and Goliath"
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Looking at the Promise and Perils of the Emerging Big Data Sector
Book Review of Data and Goliath by Bruce Schneier
There is a certain predictability to media and technology finance. Any company looking for money is inevitably characterized as similar to whatever has recently garnered the highest valuations.
For instance, when all of the software as a service (referred to in tech jargon as SaaS) companies traded in the public markets at 10 times revenue, other businesses looked desperately for something in their operations that could be tied, however tenuously, to SaaS.
The trouble with this approach is that bubbles tend to burst, as the SaaS one did last year. And once you have introduced yourself to investors—particularly in an initial public offering—it is hard to recharacterize your story later without losing all credibility…
Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Capture Your Data and Control Your World (Review)
Security technologist Schneier (Schneier on Security) eloquently limns the challenges of maintaining privacy in the Internet age, and offers some thoughtful proposals to preserve individual freedom without compromising national security. Even readers well versed in the issues are likely to be shocked by some instances of technological intrusions, such as when a school district near Philadelphia lent high school students laptops installed with highly invasive spyware. Schneier plausibly makes the case that the powerful algorithms of companies such as Facebook could be used to actually manipulate American elections. The book also notes the psychological aspects of the loss of control of one’s data. For example, for most of human history “interactions and conversations have been ephemeral,” and the indefinite preservation of online interactions has social and emotional repercussions for which society is unprepared. Schneier may be accused by some of minimizing the threat from terrorism, however, as when he dismisses terrorists as no more of a danger than organized crime, an analogy that weakens the overall strength of his case…
Data and Goliath: Confronting the Surveillance Society
Within a remarkably short period of time—less than two decades—all of us have become immersed in a sea of electronic data collection. Our purchases, communications, Internet searches, and even our movements all generate collectible traces that can be recorded, packaged, and sold or exploited.
Before we have had a chance to collectively think about what this phenomenal growth in data production and collection means, and to decide what to do about it, it threatens to become an irreversible feature of our lives.
In his new book Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Capture Your Data and Control Your World…
Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World (Review)
In Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World, author Bruce Schneier could have justifiably written an angry diatribe full of vitriol against President Obama, his administration, and the NSA for their wholesale spying on innocent Americans and violations of myriad laws and the Constitution. Instead, he has written a thoroughly convincing and brilliant book about big data, mass surveillance and the ensuing privacy dangers facing everyone.
A comment like what’s the big deal? often indicates a naiveté about a serious significant underlying issue. The idea that if you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear is a dangerously narrow concept on the value of privacy. For many people the notion that the NSA was performing spying on Americans was perceived as not being a big deal, since if a person is innocent, then what they have to worry about. In the book, Schneier debunks that myth and many others, and defends the important of privacy…
A Way Forward: Bruce Schneier’s Data and Goliath Explains Where Our Privacy is Now, and How We Fix It
EFF is honored to have renowned security technologist Bruce Schneier as a member of our board and a collaborator for nearly 20 years. But even if we’d never met him, we’d still be incredibly excited about the release of his new book, Data and Goliath.
Schneier has been providing detailed analyses of cryptography, big data, NSA leaks, security flaws, and more for decades (when he’s not terrifying NSA Director Mike Rogers with deceptively simple questions about security). What’s exceptional about his writing and his is that he manages to be well-researched, in-depth, and accurate while remaining accessible to non-technical readers…
Trying to Make Sense of the World of Ubiquitous Surveillance
Bruce Schneier's 'Data and Goliath' a lucid overview of how corporate and governmental surveillance works
Excerpt
On a recent trip overseas, I brushed up against these overlapping systems of control. In the international airport in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, I saw devices set up that automatically took temperature readings of arriving passengers (the Ebola scare was ongoing). When I returned from my trip and entered customs at John F. Kennedy International Airport, security officers divided us into lines based on national background. I swiped my passport at a kiosk, received some sort of receipt, and was made to wait again. Whatever this piece of paper meant, it was apparently better than one received by a young man next to me. His was marked with several Xs; it seemed no coincidence that, his skin being brown and mine white, he had been selected for further investigation, and I was allowed to move forward…
Bruce Schneier’s Important New Book
Bruce has just published Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World, a book that will interest many Lawfare readers. Data and Goliath is deeply informed and accessibly written analysis of mass surveillance by firms and the government. Part One is a terrific tutorial on big data and data mining, in the public and private sectors (and the two sectors in conjunction). Part Two explains the many reasons Bruce thinks we should worry about big data and data mining. And Part Three calls for very extensive limitations and regulation of public and private data collection and use. Bruce is more worried about surveillance than I am, and his prescriptions in some respects seem self-defeating to me. But among the book’s many virtues is that Bruce fully understands and fairly engages contrary arguments. I have a review of the book coming out soon, and I recommend it highly…
Bruce Schneier's Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World (Book Review)
No one explains security, privacy, crypto and safety better than Bruce Schneier, and while he’s been talking about this subject for decades, it’s never been more relevant, as his new guide to the post-Snowden world Data and Goliath demonstrates.
It’s been nearly two years since the Snowden revelations, and we’re nowhere near figuring out what to make of his revelations, but now there’s a book that collects all the most significant facts, implications and insights from the debates and packages them in a way that is accessible, smart, and important…
Data and Goliath a Portrait of Big Data Abuses
A new book by security expert Bruce Schneier is raising serious questions about the state of privacy in the big data age, and whether giving corporations and government access to the most intimate details of our lives in exchange for convenience and security is a tradeoff we should be making.
Since 9/11, Schneier has been an outspoken critic of the government’s sometimes ham-handed approach to security. Take the airport security checkpoints, for example. Is the economic loss from asking everybody to wait in line and take off their belts and shoes (more than $10 billion per year in 2004 dollars) or the added deaths from people deciding to drive instead of fly (500 per year) worth the marginal increase in security we get from the checkpoints? In Schneier’s analysis, they’re not…
Book Review
In my Open Forum article, “Privacy and Social Media,” February 2015, I mentioned Bruce Schneier’s new book, Data and Goliath (W.W.Norton & Company). For those concerned with the arrival of the surveillance state, this is a must-read book, and one of the best assessments of our current state of affairs. Schneier delves into all of the areas that I find most disconcerting, including our general loss of privacy and anonymity and the omnipresence of corporate and government Big Brother in nearly all facets of our lives. Are we really surprised that most social media, online search engines, and other corporations are selling our data, while others are aggregating that data (think big data and analytics), disabling our ability to remain anonymous? As Schneier points out, there is a balance that must be struck between convenience and the benefits of data collection and analysis. But when that balance tips towards unnecessary and undesired intrusion into our private lives, it is time for a change…
Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.