Talks: 2014 Archives
Video: Security Keynote from QCon NY
Bruce Schneier gave a keynote on security, hacking and the role of governments.
Audio: The Internet, Privacy & Power
Edward Snowden’s remarkable revelations leave no doubt. Big Brother is here. The National Security Agency’s PRISM program is a clandestine mass electronic surveillance and data mining system. In plain English: it enables state spying on citizens. The American Civil Liberties Union says, “The things we do and say online leave behind ever-growing trails of personal information. With every click, we entrust our conversations, emails, photos, and much more to Facebook, Microsoft, Google and Yahoo. But what happens when the government asks these corporations to hand over their users’ private information?” What happens to our rights and expectations of privacy? The Information Superhighway as the Internet was once called has turned into a marketer’s dream and a place where our messages and intimate details of our lives disappear into the NSA’s new $1.5 billion, million square-foot complex in Bluffdale, Utah…
Video: Surveillance: The Hidden Ways You’re Tracked
Do you have secrets? Security expert Bruce Schneier has little patience for those who say they don’t.
When asked about government and corporate surveillance, there are some who shrug their shoulders and say they have nothing to fear because they have nothing to hide. Schneier’s response? “I ask them their salary and they won’t tell me. I ask them about their sexual fantasy world and they won’t tell me. The whole ‘I have nothing to hide’ thing is stupid, that’s a dumb comment,” he says. What’s more, your day-to-day behaviour is monitored in ways you wouldn’t even realise, so these details and many more could be open for all to see – and use against you. And that’s a problem, even if you happen to trust your government to use the data for good…
Video: The Future of Incident Response
Protection and detection can only take you so far, and breaches are inevitable. As a result, response incident response has stepped into the spotlight. This session will examine the economic and psychological forces within the computer security field and describe the future of incident response (IR) and thus, the industry. It will discuss how response technology, unlike detective and preventative controls, must augment people rather than replace them. Understanding the implications of this reality requires a systems theory approach to IR. This session borrows one from the US Air Force: OODA loops. By leveraging the cycle of observe, orient, decide, and act, this session demonstrates how we can optimize IR efforts, and deliver valuable insight into what is arguably the most crucial discipline to maintaining IT security in the coming decade…
Video: Is It Possible To Be Safe Online?
2nd Annual Front Line Defenders Lecture, Dublin, Ireland
Co-sponsored by University College Dublin and Trinity College Dublin
Part 1: NSA & Background
What we’ve learned from the Snowden documents is that the NSA has turned the Internet into a giant surveillance platform.
Part 2: Society & Technology Today
Data is a byproduct of our information society socialization; a lot of the conversations we have – with friends, with college, with family members – happen in digital format.
Part 3: Metadata & Surveillance
Metadata fundamentally equals surveillance…
Video: National Security Agency and Internet Security
The New America Foundation held a discussion on National Security Agency (NSA) surveillance threats to cybersecurity, Internet freedom and the economy, and what could be done at both a personal and policy level to counter these threats.
Audio: Closing Session of "Don't Spy on Us: Day of Action"
Bruce Schneier spoke at the closing session of “Don’t Spy On Us: Day of Action.”
Video: Kritikos Lecture by Bruce Schneier—Internet, Security, and Power
Do you ever have the feeling you are being “watched?” If not, perhaps you should. According to security expert Bruce Schneier, who recently teamed up with The Guardian to review the Snowden documents, NSA surveillance through the Internet is far more robust and pervasive than most of us have ever imagined. In today’s hyper-connected society, with our ever-increasing dependence on the Internet, are we making ourselves increasingly more vulnerable? Or does our connectivity actually make us more secure? Who knows what about whom, and how is this information being used? Where does trust fit into this societal equation?…
Video: NSA Surveillance and What to Do about It
Edward Snowden has given us an unprecedented window into the NSA’s surveillance activities. Drawing from both the Snowden documents and revelations from previous whistleblowers, Bruce Schneier’s talk described the sorts of surveillance the NSA conducts and how it conducts it. The emphasis was on the technical capabilities of the NSA, and not the politics or legality of their actions. Schneier then discussed what sorts of countermeasures are likely to frustrate any nation-state adversary with these sorts of capabilities. These will be techniques to raise the cost of wholesale surveillance in favor of targeted surveillance: ubiquitous encryption, target dispersal, anonymity tools, and so on…
Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.