Entries Tagged "Schneier news"

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My Fellowship at the Berkman Center

I have been awarded a fellowship at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, for the 2013–2014 academic year. I’m excited about this; Berkman and Harvard is where a lot of the cool kids hang out, and I’m looking forward to working with them this coming year.

In particular, I have three goals for the year:

  • I want to have my own project. I’ll be continuing to work on my research—and possible book—on security and power and technology. There are a bunch of people I would like to work with at Harvard: Yochai Benkler, Larry Lessig, Jonathan Zittrain, Joseph Nye, Jr., Steven Pinker, Michael Sandel. And others at MIT: Ethan Zuckerman, David Clark. I know I’ve forgotten names.
  • I want to make a difference on a few other Berkman projects. I don’t know what yet, but I know there will be options.
  • I want to work with some students on their projects. There are always interesting student projects, and I would like to be an informal adviser on a few of them. So if any of you are Harvard or MIT students and have a project you think I would be interested in, please e-mail me.

I’m not moving to Boston for the year, but I’ll be there a lot.

Posted on July 13, 2013 at 6:30 PM • View Comments

My Talk at Google

Last week, I gave a talk at Google. It’s another talk about power and security, my continually evolving topic-of-the-moment that could very well become my next book. This installment is different than the previous talks and interviews, but not different enough that you should feel the need to watch it if you’ve seen the others.

There are things I got wrong. There are contradictions. There are questions I couldn’t answer. But that’s my process, and I’m okay with doing it semi-publicly. As always, I appreciate comments, criticisms, reading suggestions, and so on.

EDITED TO ADD (6/30): Two commentaries on the talk.

EDITED TO ADD (8/1): To date, 14,000 people have watched the talk.

Posted on June 28, 2013 at 2:42 PM • View Comments

Trading Privacy for Convenience

Ray Wang makes an important point about trust and our data:

This is the paradox. The companies contending to win our trust to manage our digital identities all seem to have complementary (or competing) business models that breach that trust by selling our data.

…and by turning it over to the government.

The current surveillance state is a result of a government/corporate partnership, and our willingness to give up privacy for convenience.

If the government demanded that we all carry tracking devices 24/7, we would rebel. Yet we all carry cell phones. If the government demanded that we deposit copies of all of our messages to each other with the police, we’d declare their actions unconstitutional. Yet we all use Gmail and Facebook messaging and SMS. If the government demanded that we give them access to all the photographs we take, and that we identify all of the people in them and tag them with locations, we’d refuse. Yet we do exactly that on Flickr and other sites.

Ray Ozzie is right when he said that we got what we asked for when we told the government we were scared and that they should do whatever they wanted to make us feel safer. But we also got what we asked for when we traded our privacy for convenience, trusting these corporations to look out for our best interests.

We’re living in a world of feudal security. And if you watch Game of Thrones, you know that feudalism benefits the powerful—at the expense of the peasants.

Last night, I was on All In with Chris Hayes (parts one and two). One of the things we talked about after the show was over is how technological solutions only work around the margins. That’s not a cause for despair. Think about technological solutions to murder. Yes, they exist—wearing a bullet-proof vest, for example—but they’re not really viable. The way we protect ourselves from murder is through laws. This is how we’re also going to protect our privacy.

EDITED TO ADD (6/18): The Onion nailed it back in 2011.

Posted on June 13, 2013 at 4:06 PM • View Comments

Security and Human Behavior (SHB 2013)

I’m at the Sixth Interdisciplinary Workshop on Security and Human Behavior (SHB 2013). This year we’re in Los Angeles, at USC—hosted by CREATE.

My description from last year still applies:

SHB is an invitational gathering of psychologists, computer security researchers, behavioral economists, sociologists, law professors, business school professors, political scientists, anthropologists, philosophers, and others—all of whom are studying the human side of security—organized by Alessandro Acquisti, Ross Anderson, and me. It’s not just an interdisciplinary event; most of the people here are individually interdisciplinary.

It is still the most intellectually stimulating conference I attend all year. The format has remained unchanged since the beginning. Each panel consists of six people. Everyone has ten minutes to talk, and then we have half an hour of questions and discussion. The format maximizes interaction, which is really important in an interdisciplinary conference like this one.

The conference website contains a schedule and a list of participants, which includes links to writings by each of them. Both Ross Anderson and Vaibhav Garg have liveblogged the event.

Here are my posts on the first, second, third, fourth, and fifth SHB workshops. Follow those links to find summaries, papers, and audio recordings of the workshops.

Posted on June 5, 2013 at 7:20 AM • View Comments

Me at the Berkman Center

Earlier this month I spent a week at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, talking to people about power, security, technology, and threats (details here). As part of that week, I gave a public talk at Harvard. Because my thoughts are so diffuse and disjoint, I didn’t think I could pull it all together into a coherent talk. Instead, I asked Jonathan Zittrain to interview me on stage. He did, and the results are here: both video and transcript.

Be warned, though. You’re getting a bunch of half-formed raw thoughts, contradictions and all. I appreciate comments, criticisms, reading suggestions, and so on.

Posted on April 19, 2013 at 1:40 PM • View Comments

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Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.