Bruce Schneier Archives

Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World by Bruce Schneier. He is a fellow at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, lecturer in Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, and board member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, AccessNow, and the Tor Project.

Bruce is moreover, writing a book about surveillance. He is addressing the who and why, how it works, and the business models. This is certainly a complicated issue. Most importantly, your privacy is very important.

Above all, we live in a surveillance state today. Bruce is sharing enormous amounts of resources revealing how vast amounts our personal data are harvested. In addition, Facebook is the greatest abuser, with Google’s Gmail not far behind.

One of the important lessons is that much of this has become voluntary. We want free services (email, cloud storage) or cheap hardware mobile phones and big, smart TVs, so we actually permit corporate surveillance within our living rooms.

In addition, this reminds me of lessons from The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff. Companies promise cheaper services and convenience to justify their surveillance technology, while local, state and federal governments make a promise of protection and physical security.

Apps are tracking us all day long

We certainly all understand by now that cellular carriers track everywhere you travel. Facebook records your location each time you open their app on your phone. In addition, Google Maps and their Waze traffic app records your GPS data, and even your credit card purchases.

Click Here to Kill Everybody, Security and Survival in a Hyper-connected World by Bruce Schneier. He is a fellow at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, lecturer in Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, and board member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, AccessNow, and the Tor Project. He is also an Advisory Board Member of the Electronic Privacy Information Center and VerifiedVoting.org.

Consequently, Bruce details many key issues in computer security that require the leadership and legislative pen of Congress. I certainly could not have picked a better time to read this book. My review is certainly just scratching the surface of his book. Bruce has communicated a much needed story for every consumer.

Above all, consider the 2021 Colonial Pipeline ransomware attack, the 2016 attacks upon our voting infrastructure, or even China’s digital espionage stealing almost every aspect of American innovation.

Do you think the internet is still growing in size? It is not the number of people, but rather the millions of new devices that pose increased risks. Therefore Bruce is calling for policies to protect these devices, knows as the Internet of Things (IoT). Examples of cyber attacks upon automobiles, electric and nuclear plants, medical devices and even airplanes is certainly proof that we are at greater risk.

A different era of industrial controls

Above all, cyber risk originates from different time in history. Besides, in the 1950s did consumers in South America have access to the internet? Any talented programmer in South America had no means to hack conventional hydroelectric dam controllers. However, today this is a reality. So then, the programmatic controls for any damn in American could not have envisioned this threat:

former National Cybersecurity Center director Rod Beckstrom summarized it this way: (1) anything connected to the Internet can be hacked; (2) everything is being connected to the Internet; (3) as a result, everything is becoming vulnerable.
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At the same time, we really don’t have to look forward, but rather back at the innovations created in the 1950s and 1960s that launched the connected internet.