Entries Tagged "books"

Page 1 of 15

LLM Summary of My Book Beyond Fear

Claude (Anthropic’s LLM) was given this prompt: Please summarize the themes and arguments of Bruce Schneier’s book Beyond Fear. I’m particularly interested in a taxonomy of his ethical arguments—please expand on that. Then lay out the most salient criticisms of the book.

Claude’s reply:

Here’s a brief summary of the key themes and arguments made in security expert Bruce Schneier’s book Beyond Fear: Thinking Sensibly About Security in an Uncertain World:

Central Themes:

  • Effective security requires realistic risk assessment, not fear-driven responses. We need to rationally determine actual threats versus perceived ones.
  • Security trade-offs need to be carefully balanced against costs to other values like privacy, freedom, and social/economic impacts.
  • Human psychology and biases lead to exaggerated fears that politicians/marketers can exploit, resulting in wasteful and theatrical “security theater.”
  • Security is a process that requires ongoing flexibility, not total prevention. We can’t anticipate every threat but can build resilience.

Key Arguments:

  • Analyze risks empirically using evidence, statistics, and probability rather than intuition. Avoid underestimating everyday risks while overestimating novel or sensational ones.
  • Reject the temptation to implement oppressive security restrictions after tragic but unlikely events. Focus only on proportional responses.
  • Where possible, favor openness and transparency over aggressive data collection or restrictions which erode civil liberties.
  • Seek security policies and technologies that enhance society broadly rather than benefit special interests.

Schneier argues for rational, ethical approaches to security aimed at genuine protection while avoiding violations of human rights in the name of safety.

Here are some of the key ethical arguments Bruce Schneier makes in Beyond Fear regarding security policy and practices:

  • Utilitarian Ethics – Security measures should aim to provide the greatest societal benefit and well-being for the most people, not just special interests.
  • Individual Autonomy – Restrictions should be minimized to avoid excessive infringements on civil liberties and individual freedoms. Surveillance creep risks violating autonomy.
  • Privacy Rights – Pervasive monitoring and data collection erode privacy rights and dignity. Citizens are entitled to some degree of opacity.
  • Proportional Responses – Reactive policies should weigh costs versus statistically likely benefits. Draconian rules beyond proportionality are unethical.
  • Justice and Fairness – Security should not create racial, religious or other profiling biases that punish groups rather than conduct.
  • Accountability and Transparency – Ethical security requires checks against excessive power and oversight for responsibility. Secrecy enables abuses.
  • Honest Representation – Officials and pundits have an ethical duty not to stoke disproportionate public fears. Security theater manufactures consent.
  • Integrity and Character – Leaders should have the wisdom and courage to make difficult trade-offs rather than exploit fears for authority and control.

Overall Schneier argues security policies grounded in ethics rather than fear promote human well-being while recognizing inherent trade-offs. Prudence, transparency, and proportionality are essential.

Here are some of the most salient criticisms made against the arguments put forth in Bruce Schneier’s book Beyond Fear:

  • Downplays real threats – Some argue Schneier dangerously downplays serious risks like terrorism and cybercrime by calling fears overblown.
  • Too theoretical – His risk analysis approach may rely too much on statistics versus real-world uncertainties that defy probabilistic reasoning.
  • No easy answers – While citing misguided policies, critics say Schneier provides few actionable solutions or concrete policy guidance.
  • Conflicting values – His balancing of security, privacy and liberty involves inherent trade-offs and tough choices he gives little direction on.
  • Politically naive – Suggesting special interests drive policy may under-appreciate legitimate national security concerns of elected officials.
  • Hindsight bias – Assessing past overreactions easier than predicting future threats that justify caution today.
  • No accounting for psychology – Factoring human irrationality into policy is essential, not dismissed as “security theater.”
  • Technical focus – Focuses narrowly on certain technologies while ignoring broader organizational and sociological dimensions.

In summary, critics argue Schneier’s risk analysis orientation is too clinical, abstract, and devoid of political and human realities to transform concrete policy in the ways he intends. His framework may therefore lack sufficient nuance or guidance.

It’s interesting. The summary is pretty accurate, and so are the criticisms. The book was a product of my thinking twenty years ago, and my own thinking has evolved to address those criticisms.

Of course, this only works with older books that the LLM has ingested, and probably works better with books that have been written about.

Posted on September 15, 2023 at 3:12 PMView Comments

A Hacker’s Mind News

My latest book continues to sell well. Its ranking hovers between 1,500 and 2,000 on Amazon. It’s been spied in airports.

Reviews are consistently good. I have been enjoying giving podcast interviews. It all feels pretty good right now.

You can order a signed book from me here.

For those of you in New York, I’m giving at book talk at the Ford Foundation on Thursday, April 6. Admission is free, but you have to register.

Posted on March 24, 2023 at 3:07 PMView Comments

A Hacker’s Mind Is Now Published

Tuesday was the official publication date of A Hacker’s Mind: How the Powerful Bend Society’s Rules, and How to Bend them Back. It broke into the 2000s on the Amazon best-seller list.

Reviews in the New York Times, Cory Doctorow’s blog, Science, and the Associated Press.

I wrote essays related to the book for CNN and John Scalzi’s blog.

Two podcast interviews: Keen On and Lawfare. And a written interview for the Ash Center at the Harvard Kennedy School.

Lots more coming, I believe. Get your copy here.

And—last request—right now there’s one Amazon review, and it’s not a good one. If people here could leave reviews, I would appreciate it.

Posted on February 10, 2023 at 3:03 PMView Comments

A Hacker’s Mind News

A Hacker’s Mind will be published on Tuesday.

I have done a written interview and a podcast interview about the book. It’s been chosen as a “February 2023 Must-Read Book” by the Next Big Idea Club. And an “Editor’s Pick”—whatever that means—on Amazon.

There have been three reviews so far. I am hoping for more. And maybe even a published excerpt or two.

Amazon and others will start shipping the book on Tuesday. If you ordered a signed copy from me, it is already in the mail.

If you can leave a review somewhere, I would appreciate it.

Posted on February 3, 2023 at 3:03 PMView Comments

Publisher’s Weekly Review of A Hacker’s Mind

Publisher’s Weekly reviewed A Hacker’s Mind—and it’s a starred review!

“Hacking is something that the rich and powerful do, something that reinforces existing power structures,” contends security technologist Schneier (Click Here to Kill Everybody) in this excellent survey of exploitation. Taking a broad understanding of hacking as an “activity allowed by the system that subverts the… system,” Schneier draws on his background analyzing weaknesses in cybersecurity to examine how those with power take advantage of financial, legal, political, and cognitive systems. He decries how venture capitalists “hack” market dynamics by subverting the pressures of supply and demand, noting that venture capital has kept Uber afloat despite the company having not yet turned a profit. Legal loopholes constitute another form of hacking, Schneier suggests, discussing how the inability of tribal courts to try non-Native individuals means that many sexual assaults of Native American women go unprosecuted because they were committed by non-Native American men. Schneier outlines strategies used by corporations to capitalize on neural processes and “hack… our attention circuits,” pointing out how Facebook’s algorithms boost content that outrages users because doing so increases engagement. Elegantly probing the mechanics of exploitation, Schneier makes a persuasive case that “we need society’s rules and laws to be as patchable as your computer.” With lessons that extend far beyond the tech world, this has much to offer.

The book will be published on February 7. Here’s the book’s webpage. You can pre-order a signed copy from me here.

Posted on January 21, 2023 at 7:18 AMView Comments

Booklist Review of A Hacker’s Mind

Booklist reviews A Hacker’s Mind:

Author and public-interest security technologist Schneier (Data and Goliath, 2015) defines a “hack” as an activity allowed by a system “that subverts the rules or norms of the system […] at the expense of someone else affected by the system.” In accessing the security of a particular system, technologists such as Schneier look at how it might fail. In order to counter a hack, it becomes necessary to think like a hacker. Schneier lays out the ramifications of a variety of hacks, contrasting the hacking of the tax code to benefit the wealthy with hacks in realms such as sports that can innovate and change a game for the better. The key to dealing with hacks is being proactive and providing adequate patches to fix any vulnerabilities. Schneier’s fascinating work illustrates how susceptible many systems are to being hacked and how lives can be altered by these subversions. Schneier’s deep dive into this cross-section of technology and humanity makes for investigative gold.

The book will be published on February 7. Here’s the book’s webpage. You can pre-order a signed copy from me here.

Posted on January 14, 2023 at 11:29 AMView Comments

New Book: A Hacker’s Mind

I have a new book coming out in February. It’s about hacking.

A Hacker’s Mind: How the Powerful Bend Society’s Rules, and How to Bend them Back isn’t about hacking computer systems; it’s about hacking more general economic, political, and social systems. It generalizes the term hack as a means of subverting a system’s rules in unintended ways.

What sorts of system? Any system of rules, really. Take the tax code, for example. It’s not computer code, but it’s a series of algorithms—supposedly deterministic—that take a bunch of inputs about your income and produce an output that’s the amount of money you owe. This code has vulnerabilities; we call them loopholes. It has exploits; those are tax avoidance strategies. And there is an entire industry of black-hat hackers who exploit vulnerabilities in the tax code: we call them accountants and tax attorneys.

In my conception, a “hack” is something a system permits, but is unanticipated and unwanted by its designers. It’s unplanned: a mistake in the system’s design or coding. It’s subversion, or an exploitation. It’s a cheat—but only sort of. Just as a computer vulnerability can be exploited over the Internet because the code permits it, a tax loophole is “allowed” by the system because it follows the rules, even though it might subvert the intent of those rules.

Once you start thinking of hacking in this way, you’ll start seeing hacks everywhere. You can find hacks in professional sports, in customer reward programs, in financial systems, in politics; in lots of economic, political, and social systems; against our cognitive functions. A curved hockey stick is a hack, and we know the name of the hacker who invented it. Airline frequent-flier mileage runs are a hack. The filibuster was originally a hack, invented by Cato the Younger, A Roman senator in 60 BCE. Hedge funds are full of hacks.

A system is just a set of rules. Or norms, since the “rules” aren’t always formal. And even the best-thought-out sets of rules will be incomplete or inconsistent. It’ll have ambiguities, and things the designers haven’t thought of. As long as there are people who want to subvert the goals of a system, there will be hacks.

I use this framework in A Hacker’s Mind to tease out a lot of why today’s economic, political, and social systems are failing us so badly, and apply what we have learned about hacking defenses in the computer world to those more general hacks. And I end by looking at artificial intelligence, and what will happen when AIs start hacking. Not the problems of hacking AI, which are both ubiquitous and super weird, but what happens when an AI is able to discover new hacks against these more general systems. What happens when AIs find tax loopholes, or loopholes in financial regulations. We have systems in place to deal with these sorts of hacks, but they were invented when hackers were human and reflect the human pace of hack discovery. They won’t be able to withstand an AI finding dozens, or hundreds, of loopholes in financial regulations. We’re simply not ready for the speed, scale, scope, and sophistication of AI hackers.

A Hacker’s Mind is my pandemic book, written in 2020 and 2021. It represents another step in my continuing journey of increasing generalizations. And I really like the cover. It will be published on February 7. It makes an excellent belated holiday gift. Order yours today and avoid the rush.

Posted on November 11, 2022 at 2:11 PMView Comments

Gus Simmons’s Memoir

Gus Simmons is an early pioneer in cryptography and computer security. I know him best for his work on authentication and covert channels, specifically as related to nuclear treaty verification. His work is cited extensively in Applied Cryptography.

He has written a memoir of growing up dirt-poor in 1930s rural West Virginia. I’m in the middle of reading it, and it’s fascinating.

More blog posts.

Posted on March 25, 2022 at 6:14 AMView Comments

Amy Zegart on Spycraft in the Internet Age

Amy Zegart has a new book: Spies, Lies, and Algorithms: The History and Future of American Intelligence. Wired has an excerpt:

In short, data volume and accessibility are revolutionizing sensemaking. The intelligence playing field is leveling­—and not in a good way. Intelligence collectors are everywhere, and government spy agencies are drowning in data. This is a radical new world and intelligence agencies are struggling to adapt to it. While secrets once conferred a huge advantage, today open source information increasingly does. Intelligence used to be a race for insight where great powers were the only ones with the capabilities to access secrets. Now everyone is racing for insight and the internet gives them tools to do it. Secrets still matter, but whoever can harness all this data better and faster will win.

The third challenge posed by emerging technologies strikes at the heart of espionage: secrecy. Until now, American spy agencies didn’t have to interact much with outsiders, and they didn’t want to. The intelligence mission meant gathering secrets so we knew more about adversaries than they knew about us, and keeping how we gathered secrets a secret too.

[…]

In the digital age, however, secrecy is bringing greater risk because emerging technologies are blurring nearly all the old boundaries of geopolitics. Increasingly, national security requires intelligence agencies to engage the outside world, not stand apart from it.

I have not yet read the book.

Posted on February 8, 2022 at 10:52 AMView Comments

Book Sale: Click Here to Kill Everybody and Data and Goliath

For a limited time, I am selling signed copies of Click Here to Kill Everybody and Data and Goliath, both in paperback, for just $6 each plus shipping.

I have 500 copies of each book available. When they’re gone, the sale is over and the price will revert to normal.

Order here and here.

Please be patient on delivery. It’s a lot of work to sign and mail hundreds of books. And the pandemic is causing mail slowdowns all over the world. I’ll send them out as quickly as I can, but I can’t guarantee any particular delivery date. Also, signed but not personalized books will arrive faster.

EDITED TO ADD (11/17): I am sold out. The sale is over.

Posted on November 15, 2021 at 2:34 PMView Comments

1 2 3 15

Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.