News in the Category "Book Reviews"

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Ben’s Book of the Month: Rewiring Democracy

  • Ben Rothke
  • RSA Conference
  • November 4, 2025

At the Infosec World 2025 conference last week, AI dominated discussions and vendor displays. One sparsely attended speaker joked that including AI in the title of his talk would have drawn a larger crowd.

When I heard about Rewiring Democracy: How AI Will Transform Our Politics, Government, and Citizenship (MIT Press) by Bruce Schneier and Dr. Nathan Sanders, I expected a harsh critique of AI’s impact on democracy, but the book instead presents a nuanced thesis on how AI will transform, rather than simply threaten, our political systems…

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Rewiring Democracy (But Not Too Much)—a Book Review

  • Malcolm Murray
  • 3 Quarks Daily
  • October 17, 2025

I recently finished reading Rewiring Democracy: How AI Will Transform Our Politics, Government and Citizenship—a book by Bruce Schneier and Nathan Sanders on the effects of AI on democracy. It comes out soon (October 25). It is a good read, worth reading for its myriad examples of AI in action at all levels of the democratic system. Ultimately, though, it seems to be a missed opportunity, failing to engage with many potential larger ways in which AI might affect democracy.

The book’s strength lies in its meticulous and hyper-granular description of all the ways that AI might affect elements of a democratic society, from enabling citizen power, to assisting in court cases, to empowering politicians. It offers many examples of how AI has been, will be, or could be adopted, for good and for ill. It maintains an admirably balanced and neutral stance throughout, detailing both the ways AI can be used to empower individual citizens, as well as how it could empower powerful vested interests. It is thoroughly organized, with separate sections on politics, legislation, administration, citizen and courts, and a starting briefer describing the relevant AI capabilities for each before outlining use cases and providing examples. The book admirably outlines the need for Public AI—AI as a common infrastructure provided by government, akin to water and electricity…

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Review of Rewiring Democracy

  • Ben Shneiderman
  • Human-Centered AI Google Group
  • October 9, 2025

Bruce Schneier and Nathan Sanders have been working on Rewiring Democracy: How AI Will Transform Our Politics, Government, and Citizenship (The MIT Press, Oct. 21, 2025). Their broad-ranging review imagines the many ways AI will impact politicians, legislators, administrators, jurists, and citizens. Their example-packed analyses, with calls to action, are largely hope-filled, with comments such as: “Despite the fantasies of some, we don;t anticipate that AIs will replace the humans who perform these tasks anytime soon. Nonetheless, over time, we expect that AI will make civil servants more effective at their jobs, and democracy more responsive to its constituents. Administrators and policymakers need to ensure that these efficiencies make government serve people better and more equitably.” They believe that: “Security is the biggest major barrier to using AI in democratic applications that no one seems to be talking about.” In general, Schneier and Sanders expect positive outcomes from AI implementations, but wisely warn of dangers: “If our goal is to ensure that AI generally benefits democracy rather than harms it, then we have a lot of work to do.” Their forward-looking scenarios mean that they repeatedly use words like: could, should, must, and can. They close with 7 organizing principles, such as “AI tools must be made widely available” and “AI developers and tools must be transparent.” Then they offer 4 paths such as promoting “responsible use of AI in society” so that “we may just be able to use this technology to rewire democracy to better serve all of us.” Overall, a valuable, wise, and balanced contribution in non-technical terms that will be welcomed by the five communities they address, and I hope the researchers and developers who could produce the happier outcomes the authors seek…

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A Hacker’s Mind: How the Powerful Bend Society’s Rules, and How to Bend Them Back (2023) by Bruce Schneier

  • Sandip Dholakia
  • The Ohio State University Institute for Cybersecurity & Digital Trust
  • March 17, 2025

Bottom Line:

Hall of Fame Candidate; I recommend this nonfiction book for the Cybersecurity Canon Hall of Fame.

Review:

When we think of a hacker, we think of a person wearing a black hoodie with a skull logo on the front. That is because we associate hacking with criminals and technology. However, that is not always the case, according to Bruce Schneier. In his latest book, “A Hacker’s Mind: How the Powerful Bend Society’s Rules, and How to Bend Them Back,” the author, a seasoned security professional, defies this common notion. Schneier explains that hacking does not have to be associated only with technology and criminals. He explains that whenever we bend rules or find loopholes in the system, we are hacking the system…

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The Hacking of Organizational Systems

  • Russ Bredholt, Jr.
  • Strategist Post
  • March 1, 2024

“There are only two types of organizations. Those that have been hacked and those that don’t know it yet.”—John Chambers

Comcast said nearly 36 million U.S. Xfinity accounts were compromised after hackers accessed its systems through a vulnerability in third-party cloud-computing software. The breach occurred between October 16 and October 19, 2023.

On Sunday, February 18, 2024, at the Munich Security Conference, FBI Director Christopher Wray said China’s cyberattacks on U.S. infrastructure are “unprecedented.”

AT&T announced that the cause of its 12-hour nationwide outage on February 22, 2024, was the “execution of an incorrect process,” not a cyberattack. In simpler terms, the company admitted to human error…

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The Best Information Security Books of 2023

  • Ben Rothke
  • Medium
  • December 19, 2023

Excerpt

It’s been a year since I wrote The 5 Best Information Security Books of 2022, two years since The 5 Best Information Security Books of 2021, which was preceded by The Best Information Security Books of 2020 and The Best Information Security Books of 2019. With that, as the year is coming to a close, here’s my list of the Best Information Security Books of 2023.

Information security book of the year

When it comes to information security rock stars, Bruce Schneier is on everyone’s list. He’s written numerous books over the decades, the most important of which may be his classic …

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Book Review: A Hacker’s Mind

  • Ben Rothke
  • RSA Conference
  • July 14, 2023

When asked to name the world’s largest hacking firm, most people would think along the lines of Rapid 7 or Check Point. But in truth, it is Deloitte and PwC who are the largest hacking firms. It’s not because they have so many penetration testers. Instead, it is due to how many accountants and lawyers they employ.

And that is the underlying theme Bruce Schneier makes in his excellent new book A Hacker’s Mind: How the Powerful Bend Society’s Rules, and How to Bend them Back (W.W. Norton Publishing). His premise is that hacking is, in fact, a universal trait. While those in the information security field think of hacking in terms of zero days and Windows vulnerabilities, finding gaps in things is a normal human response…

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Book Review: A Hacker’s Mind by Bruce Schneier

  • David Strom
  • Web Informant
  • May 27, 2023

I have known Bruce Schneier for many years, and met him most recently just after he gave one of the keynotes at this year’s RSA show. The keynote extends his thoughts in his most recent book, A Hacker’s Mind, which he wrote last year and was published this past winter. (I reviewed some of his earlier works in a blog for Avast here.)

Even if you are new to Schneier, not interested in coding, and aren’t all that technical, you should read his book because he sets out how hacking works in our everyday lives.

He chronicles how hacks pervade our society. You will hear about the term Double Irish with a Dutch Sandwich (how Google and Apple and others have hacked and thus avoided paying US taxes), the exploits of the Pudding Guy (the person who hacked American Airlines’ frequent flyer system by purchasing thousands of pudding cups to obtain elite status), or when the St. Louis Browns baseball team hacked things by hiring a 3’7″ batter back in 1951. There are less celebrated hacks, such as when investment firm Goldman Sachs owned a quarter of the total US aluminum supply back in the 2010’s to control its spot price. What was their hack? They moved it around several Chicago-area warehouses each day: the spot price depends on the time material is delivered. Clever, right?…

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Hacking Procedure

  • Curtis E.A. Karnow
  • California Litigation Vol. 36 Iss. 1 (2023)
  • April 19, 2023

A long time ago I joined Bruce Schneier on a panel on cyber security. I spoke on legal issues, developing a theme on self-defense which I later turned into a paper which won a little prize. Schneier was the real expert though, knowledgeable not just on technical details, the state of the art, but also the human factor and organizational causes of insecure computer systems. He’s since come out with a series of books on computer security, privacy, and related issues, and publishes a fairly regular “Crypto-Gram” newsletter.

Hacker’s Mind

Schneier’s latest book is “A Hacker’s Mind: How the Powerful Bend Society’s Rules, and How to Bend them Back.” This plays off the old notion of the hacker—the one I grew up with—as one who delights in understanding and manipulating systems to generate unexpected results- or at least results unintended by the system’s developer. A hacker is not a crook, but an exploder of limits. “Hacks follow the rules of a system but subvert their intent,” Schneier writes in his March 15, 2023 Crypto-Gram. Hacks aren’t necessarily illegal, although some are. Some are normalized and eventually accepted as a feature of the system. Banks that play fast and loose with reserve requirements might lead Congress to make the practice illegal (or the opposite: Congress might bail out the banks and allow bankers to keep their bonuses). Tax loopholes which plainly subvert the public intent of the tax system are often subsumed as an acceptable practice…

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A Hacker’s Mind—How the Elites Exploit the System

  • Becky Hogge
  • Financial Times
  • February 10, 2023

What does the computer world have to teach us about designing for resilience in other domains? Quite a lot, argues Bruce Schneier, in a new book that sees the security expert turn his gaze to the increasingly vulnerable financial, legal and political systems that underpin society.

“When most people look at a system, they focus on how it works,” writes Schneier, whose popular books and practical expertise have earned him a stellar reputation in the computer security field. “When security technologists look at the same system, they can’t help but focus on how it can be made to fail.”…

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Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.