Schneier on Security

New Book: Data and Goliath

After a year of talking about it, my new book is finally published.

This is the copy from the inside front flap:

You are under surveillance right now.

Your cell phone provider tracks your location and knows who’s with you. Your online and in-store purchasing patterns are recorded, and reveal if you’re unemployed, sick, or pregnant. Your e-mails and texts expose your intimate and casual friends. Google knows what you’re thinking because it saves your private searches. Facebook can determine your sexual orientation without you ever mentioning it.

The powers that surveil us do more than simply store this information. Corporations use surveillance to manipulate not only the news articles and advertisements we each see, but also the prices we’re offered. Governments use surveillance to discriminate, censor, chill free speech, and put people in danger worldwide. And both sides share this information with each other or, even worse, lose it to cybercriminals in huge data breaches.

Much of this is voluntary: we cooperate with corporate surveillance because it promises us convenience, and we submit to government surveillance because it promises us protection. The result is a mass surveillance society of our own making. But have we given up more than we’ve gained? In Data and Goliath, security expert Bruce Schneier offers another path, one that values both security and privacy. He shows us exactly what we can do to reform our government surveillance programs and shake up surveillance-based business models, while also providing tips for you to protect your privacy every day. You’ll never look at your phone, your computer, your credit cards, or even your car in the same way again.

And there’s a great quote on the cover:

“The public conversation about surveillance in the digital age would be a good deal more intelligent if we all read Bruce Schneier first.”—Malcolm Gladwell, author of David and Goliath

This is the table of contents:

I’ve gotten some great responses from people who read the bound galley, and hope for some good reviews in mainstream publications. So far, there’s one review.

You can buy the book at Amazon, Amazon UK, Barnes & Noble, Powell’s, Book Depository, or IndieBound—which routes your purchase through a local independent bookseller. E-books are available on Amazon, B&N, Apple’s iBooks store, and Google Play.

And if you can, please write a review for Amazon, Goodreads, or anywhere else.

Posted on February 15, 2015 at 6:41 AM • View Comments

Data and Goliath Is Finished

Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World is finished. I submitted it to my publisher, Norton, this morning. In a few weeks, I’ll get the copyedited manuscript back, and a few weeks after that, it’ll go into production. Stacks of printed books will come out the other end in February, and the book will be published on March 9. There’s already an Amazon page, but it’s still pretty preliminary. And I expect the price to go down.

Books are both a meandering and clarifying process for me, and I figure out what I’m writing about as I write about it. Data and Goliath started out being about security and power in cyberspace, and ended up being about digital surveillance and what to do about it.

This is the table of contents:

Fundamentally, the issues surrounding mass surveillance are tensions between group interest and self-interest, a topic I covered in depth in Liars and Outliers. We’re promised great benefits if we allow all of our data to be collected in one place; at the same time, it can be incredibly personal. I see this tension playing out in many areas: location data, social graphs, medical data, search histories. Figuring out the proper balances between group and self-interests, and ensuring that those balances are maintained, is the fundamental issue of the information age. It’s how we are going to be judged by our descendants fifty years from now.

Anyway, the book is done and at the publisher. I’m happy with it; the manuscript is so tight you can bounce a quarter off of it. This is a complicated topic, and I think I distilled it down into 80,000 words that are both understandable by the lay reader and interesting to the policy wonk or technical geek. It’s also an important topic, and I hope the book becomes a flash point for discussion and debate.

But that’s not for another five months. You might think that’s a long time, but in publishing that’s incredibly fast. I convinced Norton to go with this schedule by stressing that the book becomes less timely every second it’s not published. (An exaggeration, I know, but they bought it.) Now I just hope that nothing major happens between now and then to render the book obsolete.

For now, I want to get back to writing shorter pieces. Writing a book can be all-consuming, and I generally don’t have time for anything else. Look at my essays. Last year, I wrote 59 essays. This year so far: 17. That’s an effect of writing the book. Now that it’s done, expect more essays on news websites and longer posts on this blog. It’ll be good to be thinking about something else for a change.

If anyone works for a publication, and wants to write a review, conduct an interview, publish an excerpt, or otherwise help me get the word out about the book, please e-mail me and I will pass you on to Norton’s publicity department. I think this book has a real chance of breaking out of my normal security market.

Posted on October 7, 2014 at 6:36 AM • View Comments