News in the Category "Book Reviews"
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Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World
Data and Goliath is Bruce Schneier’s most recent book. Published in 2015, the book addresses the issues arising from governments’ and corporations’ great capabilities of mass surveillance, and the dangers they bring about. As Schneier aptly puts it, “[w]e live in the golden age of surveillance,” and this affects both our security as well as our freedoms (4). The book is meant to convey an eye-opening message: we need to change the status quo, and we need to do it soon.
Since its publication, Data and Goliath has been recognised as being a thought-provoking and compelling book about the reality of surveillance, leading Malcolm Gladwell[…
Education Recs
What book has provided the greatest inspiration for your career?
Excerpt
Liars and Outliers: Enabling the Trust That Society Needs to Thrive by Bruce Schneier (Wiley). “I picked up this book because it was about information security. In reading it, I discovered a much broader and more philosophical work. The core premise is that trust and cooperation are intrinsic to all human interactions, cultures, and societies. The author syn- thesizes research from a wide swath of disciplines, including computer security, econom- ics, evolutionary biology, law, neuroscience, psychology, and philosophy. While it is an excellent book about security law and policy, I learned just as much about organizational structure and governance, rational decision-making, and the nature of innovation.”…
Book Review – Applied Cryptography Part I and II – Bruce Schneier
This book has been, without a doubt, crucial in aiding my understanding of cryptosystems and why things are the way they are, and how do these cryptic crypto algorithms even work. If you are interested in learning how to develop software that are ‘correct’ and secure, then this is a great book to understand what are the primitives of information security, what algorithms already exist and which ones to use in what scenario.
So the motivation to pursue a thorough understanding of cryptography and to gain the ability and knowledge required to make a secure cryptosystem came sometime after college ended, when I and Kunal were working on a terminal chat application that would support end-to-end encryption. At that time, I hardly knew what I had gotten myself into (which is similar to a lot of things in my life), as the application development part seemed very simple. We got done with the application part, terminal app and the backend, and then came the encryption part, and that is when the knowledge about existing techniques and understanding of basic crypto primitives fell short. And that is when I started reading about cryptography and stumbled upon this book…
The Cybersecurity Canon: Data and Goliath
Executive Summary
“Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World” is a book meant to scare you, and it does a good job. The book is designed to get our attention and serve as a wake-up call on a number of issues that beg for more robust public discussion. Chief among these issues are mass surveillance from governments and the commercial world, and how this is affecting personal privacy and even public security. More importantly, I believe Bruce Schneier offers some excellent recommendations as to what we should all be talking about and doing when it comes to bringing these critical issues out of the shadows and into the light. Finally, this book offers some ideas that I believe can serve as the basis for the formulation of improved norms of responsible behavior, more effective government and industry policies and regulations, and perhaps more balanced national and international laws relevant to the digital age. As such, this book deserves a place of honor in the Cybersecurity Canon…
Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World by Bruce Schneier (Review)
We all surrender privacy in some form and fashion and allow companies to gather data so these enterprises can better serve us. Our cell phone provider needs to know where we are to route calls to the appropriate cell tower. As consumers and users, we allow the cell phone company to track and follow our moves because the convenience of being able to receive a call is greater than our perceived loss of privacy. For the last twenty years, Americans have accepted that the benefit of convenience outweighs the loss of privacy. Bruce Schneier makes a strong argument that this construct should no longer be the case. The book Data and Goliath has a compelling message that is a Red Thread of a question through the text: “Do you accept the surrender of your data for convenience?” The author is an authority in the field of cybersecurity—a renowned computer scientist and cryptographer. Schneier has been at the forefront of cybersecurity developments since the 1990s with an appetite to address current challenges and put them in perspective…
Video: Video Review of Data and Goliath
Scott Schober, author of Hacked Again, reviewed Bruce Schneier’s Data and Goliath.
Book Review: Data and Goliath by Bruce Schneier
How many times have you heard the “Nothing to Hide” argument? If you don’t have anything to hide, then you don’t need to worry about anyone watching you or collecting information about your thoughts and behaviors. Consider the impact to those that have nothing to hide. Depending on who is watching, people will curtail open discussion on many topics which stifle new thinking, innovation and even market disruption. Furthermore, it becomes easier to categorize and, therefore, discriminate against individuals. Privacy in our communications is much more important than most people think. And, a lack of information transparency in collection and use of data keeps this issue off the radar for most everyday people…
Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battle to Collect Your Data and Control Your World (Review)
Reviewed by Annie Millar1
Summary: Data and Goliath:The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World describes a world in which surveillance has become a part of our everyday life, a world we are currently living in. Schneier describes what we know as a result of Edward Snowden and his disclosure of confidential NSA information. He outlines three main concepts: the surveillance society we live in, the harms that arise from mass surveillance, and what we need to do to protect ourselves. This book review will focus on one of the two major surveillance parties in the world, the government…
Bruce Schneier—Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World
One of the most striking paradoxes of our time resides in our smartphones. Our everyday use of these iconic and progressively factotum apparatuses records at various levels every activity we do in space and time, with the unbelievable outcome that, on a mass scale, we’re happy about that and willfully give up our intimate privacy to be allowed to continue using them. It’s nothing new, but we’re still turning our head to what is behind. There are battles going on to conquer the most strategic parts of the big data we produce, in the huge business called “DaaS” (data as a service). Data and Goliath is a book about these battles, written by an acknowledged security expert, who has not given up on opposing the total surveillance paradigm. He thoughtfully couples a lucid analysis deducted from plenty of facts and sources with suggestions. Schneier’s privacy advocacy clarifies the overwhelming confusion in the current post-Snowden revelation period, sorting out the wrong approach to national securities and the inflated scale of control. His passionate approach doesn’t prevent him from imagining alternative scenarios, where new types of business models replace the current privacy in exchange for free services model. On the other side, an important part of the book is dedicated to advice, from breaking up the NSA into more specialized agencies, to teaching users why they need to stop sharing so much personal and intimate details and how. Being encouraged by a major expert in the field is the best argument for privacy one can ask for…
Book Review: Data and Goliath
This is one of Bruce Schneier’s latest books, but my first read from him. The title caught my attention, and I’m glad it did.
Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.