Entries Tagged "Schneier news"

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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:

Part 1: The World We’re Creating

Chapter 1: Data as a By-Product of Computing
Chapter 2: Data as Surveillance
Chapter 3: Analyzing our Data
Chapter 4: The Business of Surveillance
Chapter 5: Government Surveillance and Control
Chapter 6: Consolidation of Institutional Surveillance

Part 2: What’s at Stake

Chapter 7: Political Liberty and Justice
Chapter 8: Commercial Fairness and Equality
Chapter 9: Business Competitiveness
Chapter 10: Privacy
Chapter 11: Security

Part 3: What to Do About It

Chapter 12: Principles
Chapter 13: Solutions for Government
Chapter 14: Solutions for Corporations
Chapter 15: Solutions for the Rest of Us
Chapter 16: Social Norms and the Big Data Trade-off

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

Co3 Systems Is Hiring

At the beginning of the year, I announced that I’d joined Co3 Systems as its CTO. Co3 Systems makes coordination software—what I hear called workflow management—for incident response. Here’s a 3:30-minute video overview of how it works. It’s old; we’ve put a whole bunch of new features in the system since we made that.

We’ve had a phenomenal first two quarters, and we’re growing. We’re hiring for a bunch of positions, including a production ops engineer, an incident response specialist, and a software engineer.

Posted on June 20, 2014 at 2:19 PM • View Comments

Security and Human Behavior (SHB 2014)

I’m at SHB 2014: the Seventh Annual Interdisciplinary Workshop on Security and Human Behavior. This is a small invitational gathering of people studying various aspects of the human side of security. The fifty people in the room include psychologists, computer security researchers, sociologists, behavioral economists, philosophers, political scientists, lawyers, anthropologists, business school professors, neuroscientists, and a smattering of others. It’s not just an interdisciplinary event; most of the people here are individually interdisciplinary.

I call this the most intellectually stimulating two days of my years. The goal is discussion amongst the group. We do that by putting everyone on panels, but only letting each person talk for 5-7 minutes The rest of the 90-minute panel is left for discussion.

The conference is organized by Alessandro Acquisti, Ross Anderson, and me. This year we’re at Cambridge University, in the UK.

The conference website contains a schedule and a list of participants, which includes links to writings by each of them. Ross Anderson is liveblogging the event. It’s also being recorded; I’ll post the link when it goes live.

Here are my posts on the first, second, third, fourth, fifth, and sixth SHB workshops. Follow those links to find summaries, papers, and audio recordings of the workshops. It’s hard to believe we’ve been doing this for seven years.

Posted on June 9, 2014 at 4:50 AM • View Comments

Book Title

I previously posted that I am writing a book on security and power. Here are some title suggestions:

  • Permanent Record: The Hidden Battles to Capture Your Data and Control Your World
  • Hunt and Gather: The Hidden Battles to Capture Your Data and Control Your World
  • They Already Know: The Hidden Battles to Capture Your Data and Control Your World
  • We Already Know: The Hidden Battles to Capture Your Data and Control Your World
  • Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Capture Your Data and Control Your World
  • All About You: The Hidden Battles to Capture Your Data and Control Your World
  • Tracked: The Hidden Battles to Capture Your Data and Control Your World
  • Tracking You: The Forces that Capture Your Data and Control Your World
  • Data: The New Currency of Power

My absolute favorite is Data and Goliath, but there’s a problem. Malcolm Gladwell recently published a book with the title of David and Goliath. Normally I wouldn’t care, but I published my Liars and Outliers soon after Gladwell published Outliers. Both similarities are coincidences, but aping him twice feels like a bit much.

Anyway, comments on the above titles—and suggestions for new ones—are appreciated.

The book is still scheduled for February publication. I hope to have a first draft done by the end of June, and a final manuscript by the end of October. If anyone is willing to read and comment on a draft manuscript between those two months, please let me know in e-mail.

Posted on April 16, 2014 at 9:32 AM • View Comments

Schneier Speaking Schedule: April–May

Here’s my upcoming speaking schedule for April and May:

Information about all my speaking engagements can be found here.

Posted on April 14, 2014 at 2:11 PM • View Comments

New Book on Data and Power

I’m writing a new book, with the tentative title of Data and Power.

While it’s obvious that the proliferation of data affects power, it’s less clear how it does so. Corporations are collecting vast dossiers on our activities on- and off-line—initially to personalize marketing efforts, but increasingly to control their customer relationships. Governments are using surveillance, censorship, and propaganda—both to protect us from harm and to protect their own power. Distributed groups—socially motivated hackers, political dissidents, criminals, communities of interest—are using the Internet to both organize and effect change. And we as individuals are becoming both more powerful and less powerful. We can’t evade surveillance, but we can post videos of police atrocities online, bypassing censors and informing the world. How long we’ll still have those capabilities is unclear.

Understanding these trends involves understanding data. Data is generated by all computing processes. Most of it used to be thrown away, but declines in the prices of both storage and processing mean that more and more of it is now saved and used. Who saves the data, and how they use it, is a matter of extreme consequence, and will continue to be for the coming decades.

Data and Power examines these trends and more. The book looks at the proliferation and accessibility of data, and how it has enabled constant surveillance of our entire society. It examines how governments and corporations use that surveillance data, as well as how they control data for censorship and propaganda. The book then explores how data has empowered individuals and less-traditional power blocs, and how the interplay among all of these types of power will evolve in the future. It discusses technical controls on power, and the limitations of those controls. And finally, the book describes solutions to balance power in the future—both general principles for society as a whole, and specific near-term changes in technology, business, laws, and social norms.

There’s a fundamental trade-off we need to make as society. Our data is enormously valuable in aggregate, yet it’s incredibly personal. The powerful will continue to demand aggregate data, yet we have to protect its intimate details. Balancing those two conflicting values is difficult, whether it’s medical data, location data, Internet search data, or telephone metadata. But balancing them is what society needs to do, and is almost certainly the fundamental issue of the Information Age.

As I said, Data and Power is just a tentative title. Suggestions for a better one—either a title or a subtitle—are appreciated. Here are some ideas to get you started:

  • Data and Power: The Political Science of Information Security
  • The Feudal Internet: How Data Affects Power and How Power Affects Data
  • Our Data Shadow: The Battles for Power in the Information Society
  • Data.Power: The Political Science of Information Security
  • Data and Power in the Information Age
  • Data and Goliath: The Balance of Power in the Information Age
  • The Power of Data: How the Information Society Upsets Power Balances

My plan is to finish the manuscript by the end of October, for publication in February 2015. Norton will be the publisher. I’ll post a table of contents in a couple of months. And, as with my previous books, I will be asking for volunteers to read and comment on a draft version.

If you notice I’m not posting as many blog entries, or writing as many essays, this is what I’m doing instead.

Posted on March 21, 2014 at 12:19 PM • View Comments

Schneier Speaking Schedule: March–April

Here’s my upcoming speaking schedule for March and April.

Information about all my speaking engagements can be found here.

Posted on March 15, 2014 at 1:58 PM • View Comments

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Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.