News in the Category "Data and Goliath"
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Data and Goliath (Book Review)
Security technologist, commentator, and popular author Schneier was one of the first to analyze the documentation of NSA surveillance practices leaked by Edward Snowden. What he discovered fueled his mission to zap our complacency regarding “ubiquitous mass surveillance.” In this mind-blowing exposé, backed by 130 pages of revelatory notes, Schneier reveals exactly how all the information generated by our smartphones and computers regarding our exact location, communications, financial and medical transactions, everything we read in digital form, and every Google search is captured, stored, and traded. He elucidates the difference between data and metadata (an email’s content is data; all records pertaining to the sender, recipient, and routing are metadata), and explains how metadata is used to track our activities, interests, and concerns. With meticulously researched details and high-velocity prose, he outs the federal government’s intrusive “data mining,” the immensely profitable big-data industry, and the hidden collusion between them. Schneier convincingly argues that our privacy is “an inherent human right, and a requirement for maintaining the human condition with dignity and respect” and states that constant surveillance is too high a price to pay for electronic convenience. By matching jolting disclosures of alarming realities with lucid guiding principles and policy recommendations for forging new surveillance laws and regulations, Schneier has created an invaluable and empowering call to awareness and action…
Big Data: The Revolution Is Digitized
Excerpt
Neither Borgman nor Lohr truly grapples with the immensity of the big-data story. At its core, big data is not primarily a business or research revolution, but a social one. In the past decade, we have allowed machines to act as intermediaries in almost every aspect of our existence. When we communicate with friends, entertain ourselves, drive, exercise, go to the doctor, read a book—a computer transmitting data is there. We leave behind a vast cloud of bits and bytes.
Bruce Schneier, a security analyst known for designing the Blowfish block-cipher algorithm—a fast and flexible method of encrypting data—grasps this revolution’s true dimensions. In Data and Goliath, he describes how our relationships with government, corporations and each other are transformed by ordinary, once-ephemeral human interactions being stored in digital media. The seemingly meaningless, incidental bits of data that we shed are turning the concept of privacy into an archaism, despite half-hearted (and doomed) regulations to protect “personally identifiable information.” As science-fiction pioneer Isaac Asimov wrote some 30 years ago: “Things just seem secret because people don’t remember. If you can recall every remark, every comment, every stray word made to you or in your hearing and consider them all in combination, you find that everyone gives himself away in everything.”…
Kirkus Review of Data and Goliath
A jeremiad suggesting our addiction to data may have made privacy obsolete.
Prolific technological writer Schneier (Fellow/Berkman Center for Internet and Society, Harvard Law School; Carry On: Sound Advice from Schneier on Security, 2013, etc.) clearly examines how technology has transformed every interaction, noting how our intimate communications are now “saved in ways we have no control over.” He suggests that most Americans remain unconcerned about the relationship between data and surveillance, due to the attraction of “free” products like Gmail. He focuses on the social costs of surveillance, which “puts us at risk of abuses by those in power—exacerbated by the fact that we are generating so much data and storing it indefinitely.” He also argues that this “pervasive mass surveillance” will inevitably chill progressive movements—e.g., gay rights and cannabis decriminalization. The problem is more sprawling than most realize: Edward Snowden’s revelations clarified “how much the NSA relies on US corporations to eavesdrop on the Internet,” and corporations are using such technologies for their own ends. Yet both the NSA and corporations are blithe about how they treat the fruits of this nonstop spying. “From the military’s perspective,” writes the author, “it’s not surveillance until a human being looks at the data.” Such strange pronouncements about the common good are hard to counter, since whistleblowers such as Snowden are prohibited from explaining their actions in court. Schneier argues that all this invasion of privacy is unlikely to succeed in its alleged goal: “Even highly accurate terrorism prediction systems will be so flooded with false alarms that they will be useless.” He concludes this grim catalog of privacy erosion with a set of prescriptions for governments, corporations and “the rest of us,” advocating a mix of legal framework, incentives for fairer business models and a more realistic understanding of the current moment’s potential for harm…
Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.