News in the Category "Book Reviews"
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The Essential Guide To Digital Life: Bruce Schneier’s Data And Goliath
If you’d asked me a year ago, ‘do you worry about government surveillance?’, I would have said no. But today, my answer would be an empathic YES.
The scary part is that, like most Canadians, I hadn’t worried about that kind of surveillance until the current debate around C-51. (If you don’t know what that is, check it out here.) This terrifying bill would, among many other things, make it illegal to talk positively of terrorism on the internet. Just look at the news in Canada on any day lately, and you’ll see a report or an opinion on it. I personally like …
Wanted: Slingshots
Bruce Schneier has built a career explaining the principles of security in plain English, helping the uninitiated to think clearly and critically about managing risk, and exposing the nonsense peddled by government spokesmen and high-tech hucksters. He is at once a great popularizer and a great debunker.
Schneier’s new book, Data and Goliath, examines the prevalence, mechanisms, uses, and dangers of mass surveillance.
This book scared the hell out of me.
That doesn’t happen very often. Having spent 20 years writing about political repression, police brutality, counterinsurgency, and torture, I’ve come to expect the worst as a matter of habit. Schneier’s book, however, shows that the present state of mass surveillance—its scale, intrusiveness, and implications—surpasses what I could have imagined. It was not the big stuff, like the National Security Agency’s goal of total global omniscience (epitomized in the slogan ‘Collect it all’), but the smaller details that gave me chills. ‘It’s less Big Brother,’ Schneier writes, ‘and more hundreds of tattletale little brothers.’…
"We the People Have a Lot of Work to Do" Says Schneier in a Must-Read Book on Security and Privacy
“The surveillance society snuck up on us,” says Bruce Schneier in Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Capture Your Data and Control Your World. It’s a thought-provoking, absorbing, and comprehensive guide to our new big data world. Most important, it’s a call for a serious discussion and urgent action to stop the harms caused by the mass collection and mining of data by governments and corporations. To paraphrase Schneier’s position on anonymity—we either need to develop more robust techniques for preserving our freedom, or give up on the idea entirely…
Review of Data and Goliath
During the Cold War, communist East Germany was perhaps the most spied-upon nation on earth, with one secret police informant for every 66 citizens.
Those were the good old days. In 21st-century America, we’ve got more informants than citizens, all of them digital. Our phones and computers incessantly rat us out, broadcasting our interests, friendships, and locations to governments and corporations alike, according to renowned cryptographer and Internet privacy advocate Bruce Schneier in his new book, “Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World.”…
Two Books Look at How Modern Technology Ruins Privacy
Excerpt
“Even the East Germans couldn’t follow everybody all the time,” Bruce Schneier writes. “Now it’s easy.”
This may sound hyperbolic, but Schneier’s lucid and compelling Data and Goliath is free of the hysteria that often accompanies discussions about surveillance. Yes, our current location, purchases, reading history, driving speed and Internet use are being tracked and recorded. But Schneier’s book, which focuses mainly on the United States, is not a rant against the usual bad guys such as the U.S. government or Facebook. Schneier describes how our data is tracked by both corporate and government entities, often working together. And in many cases, the American people allow them to do it…
Verschlüsselungs-Experte Bruce Schneier "Dein Handy weiß alles über dich"
Sind Privatsphäre und Sicherheit wirklich ein Gegensatz? Bruce Schneier ist einer der bekanntesten Experten für Verschlüsselung. Er fordert, der Geheimdienst NSA solle zerschlagen werden.
Damit Bruce Schneier für einen kurzen Augenblick seine ruhige Art vergisst, reicht es aus, wie der Chef der zum Inlandsgeheimdienst gewandelten US-Bundespolizei FBI zu argumentieren. Etwa so: Haben Strafverfolgungsbehörden recht, wenn sie davor warnen, bald im Dunkeln zu tappen, weil sich Verbrecher immer stärker in den digitalen Raum verziehen? “Bullshit”, platzt Schneier in die Frage. “Das stimmt einfach nicht. Wenn man das FBI nach Beispielen fragt, werden sie plötzlich seltsam still. Wo sind denn all diese unaufgeklärten Verbrechen?” Noch nie sei es so einfach gewesen, Menschen auszuspionieren, sagt Schneier am Telefon: “Wir leben im Goldenen Zeitalter der Überwachung”…
Security Guru Bruce Schneier: Your Privacy is Already Gone
In <cite>Data and Goliath</cite>, one of the world's foremost security experts piles on the evidence that privacy is dead -- and proposes a detailed plan to restore it
You can’t help but get a little depressed as you read Bruce Schneier’s latest book, “Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Capture Your Data and Control Your World.” It confirms over and over how all our supposed guaranteed personal privacy, digital or otherwise, is nothing but a façade. Here are some examples from the book:
- It doesn’t take much metadata to specifically identify and track anyone.
- “We kill people based on metadata.”—General Michael Hayden, former director of the NSA and the CIA
- The U.S. Post Office photographs (and keeps) the exterior back and front of every piece of mail sent in the United States, and this data is available to other agencies…
The Hard Questions
A mature democracy needs to carefully balance individual privacy, national security and business efficiency.
Excerpt
New technologies are always a mixed blessing, their potential for good carrying with it the risk of evil. The deep challenge for a democracy is to develop legal rules, social practices and institutional arrangements that, at some reasonable cost, separate good from bad behavior. The exponential improvement in computation and communication technologies over the past few decades has posed this challenge in an acute form. Both large bureaucracies and determined individuals can now collect and organize huge amounts of information—and all of it,, in one sense or another, is about all of us…
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…
Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.