Schneier on Security

Bruce Schneier is an accomplished author and security expert. In my line of work, information security, I’ve studied his books before and I read his writing almost daily as his opinion is of great value and often quite interesting. If you’ve already read one of his books or if you already know what security is(something about keeping DAD away from your CIA) you should have already read Liars and Outliers (if not go buy a copy) and may not get as much out of this review.

As a much lauded and often quoted security expert, accomplished cryptographer, and prolific writer about security technology and politics Bruce Schneier has well established standing to ask questions like: “What is security? What is trust? How do they work? Where did they come from?” He, like many of us, has been searching for good answers to these questions for many years and many people already use his previous answers to these questions in the work and life. From his standing at the top of the field and his success in influencing how everyone thinks about security and trust issues in society (he coined the term “security theater”) he not only gets to seriously consider these questions but is likely to come up with new well thought out answers that will influence the world…

The book Liars and Outliers: Enabling the Trust that Society Needs to Thrive provides a framework to answer the question, “Why do people trust each other and cooperate?”

I read this book with an eye towards improving my understanding of how people filter information, which is relevant to the focus of this blog and my recent interest in improving the trustworthiness and quality of crowd-sourced product information. I also knew of and respected the author, security expert Bruce Schneier, who is a source for parts of my password management series…

I recently read Bruce Schneier’s latest book, Liars and Outliers.

This is not a how-to book. It won’t make your code more secure. I doubt that it would serve as a manual on human interactions for extraterrestrials. Nor is it likely to improve a bank loan officer’s percentage of good loans, or an eBay buyer’s choice of sellers, or your ability to detect email phishing or a corporation whose accountants have cooked the books. But it might shape your understanding of all that stuff.

Liars & Outliers is a look at how trust works in society, with passing references to neuroscience, economics and game theory. Along with a description of how the negative feedback of societal pressure is supposed to work is an explanation of why it doesn’t work so well on-line and with large corporations…

In February of this year Bruce Schneier released his latest book, Liars & Outliers—enabling the trust that society needs to thrive. This accessible book does a good job exploring the scientific theory of trust and collaboration and combines a theoretical framework with real-life examples. It does not bring many new insights to people who have followed Schneier’s other work but the theoretical framework is useful and this is a book worth reading.

Mr. Schneier is a well-known computer security specialist. In college I studied from his book Applied Cryptography, a standard work on practical cryptography, and he has a great blog on security. I received a …

Back on August 15, Bruce Schneier made an offer to sell his latest book (below cost) in exchange for a book review.  I took him up on that offer, so here is my review.

Honestly, I was a little disappointed.  I had built up a higher expectation for this book than it delivered for me.

I think there are two reasons for this.

1. I’m kind of old, and have seen at least one really bad thing – which makes a person go through the thought processes of “WHY?”.  In exploring the violation of trust that occurred, I discovered many of the things described in this book.  I suppose an advantage of buying this book is that you get the knowledge and …