I have a confession to make: I’m a total Bruce Schneier fanboy. I tracked them Cryptographer, Harvard lecturer, and privacy specialist, and was pleased to meet him in person at last week’s RSA conference in San Francisco, where he delivered a keynote (registration required) on reinventing democracy Use of cyber security concepts. Be extends to works of art Decades along with numerous books along with his own blog which publishes interesting links to security-related events, strategies, and bugs that you should follow.
Schneier began his lecture by saying that “the political systems that existed in the 18thth century are ill-suited for the 21st centurySt Century.” He mentioned that both democracy and capitalism are information systems and should be treated as such and must be constantly improved. “Democracy is not a static system but a desired direction,” he said. “But it has not moved in the same Pace evolves as does our technology.” It’s a radical notion, especially when technology breaks the constraints of geography and filtering of ideas that were part of early democratic principles. “How do we avoid polluting the 21stSt Century democracy with prejudice, misinformation and bias?” he asks.
My reason for being a fan is that he’s more often right than wrong. Already in 2007 he coined the term “Security Theater” refers to measures that are not really effective in securing systems but are put on display to reassure people that something is being done. In his 2003 book Beyond Fear, he promoted a very compelling checklist of what every security professional must do, such as: B. to consider which assets you want to protect and how to assess the risks to those assets.
His 2012 book Liars and Runaways talks about how our society cannot function without trust and still must function even when people are untrustworthy. He develops an understanding of trust, cooperation and social stability. He points out that we don’t typically check our plumber or chemically analyze our food, but when it comes to our computers and digital applications, we don’t have that innate trust.
Ten years later we suffer from a general lack of trust and the societal cracks are beginning to show. As Schneier said in his keynote, “Our formal trust systems are no longer inherently scalable. We have replaced an innate interpersonal trust with a trust in processes and institutions.”
In his 2015 book Data and Goliath, he showed us exactly what we can do to reform government surveillance programs, disrupt surveillance-based business models, and protect our privacy from social media abuse. He is a master of simple analogies, using the example of the king building a secret escape tunnel: what happens to the engineers who know about the tunnel? he asks, emphasizing that there will always be someone who knows your secrets.
His most recent book, published earlier this year, is A Hacker’s Mind. In it, he asks his Harvard students to memorize the first 100 digits of pi (he expects them to cheat and documents their attempts). The book is an appropriate preface to his RSAC keynote because it places hacking in a societal context and shows how bad actors can bend our diverse economic and legal systems, norms and rules. Rather, his talk was a framework for discussion where we can all agree on how we can continue to develop democracy and continue to create new policies that benefit the preferences of most individuals. “In today’s society, the rich and powerful are just too good at hacking,” he said.
His keynote mentions that misinformation is a feature, not a bug. The problem is the incentive structure that makes misinformation a viable strategy, because “misinformation targets fringe ideas and tries to weaponize them,” he said. “Our systems have misaligned incentives, which has disastrous consequences for society.” I was rebuffed by several people at the fair who all agree that we need a common evidence base for any successful democratic system, and misinformation throws that off .
He spoke during the keynote about the current trend towards zero-sum politics – where one party wins while the other loses – and that this situation is not optimal. “We have an economy where my success depends on your failures,” he said. “We need a game where everyone wins and it would be unlike anything we’ve ever seen. We must use plurality and embrace conflict and disagreement.”
To fix this we need to rethink the nature of growth, which he says is the fuel that powers the zero-sum world and is only relevant in a world where resources abound. He ended his presentation by proposing how to transform democracy with built-in security and identified other technical innovations to make them more efficient.
Watching the keynote reminded me of that Isaac Asimov’s 1955 short story “Franchise”. which posits a future “electronic democracy” in which a computer selects an individual voter to determine election results, thereby avoiding the need for a referendum. The year chosen in the story was 2008. Interestingly, the sole voter is asked a series of questions rather than actually voting for candidates.
I asked Schneier if he had read the story and he emailed back that he had. “I don’t think it’s a serious suggestion, despite the idea of the poll being more accurate than actual elections is something that is much discussed in the relevant communities,” he said. “We have this fiction in our head that votes are absolutely correct: that a difference of just a few votes is significant. In In reality, elections have margins of error at every step, and a lot at that close choice is a statistical tie. But of course our system no ability to deal with ties so we have to declare a winner.”
His suggestions may not be implemented, but his thoughts on how we can make our systems work better are interesting and provocative. Knowing when algorithms are allowed to make decisions for us and when not, as he noted in the keynote, will certainly become increasingly important.
Photo: Robert Hof/SiliconANGLE
Your vote of support is important to us and helps us keep the content FREE.
Clicking below supports our mission to provide free, comprehensive and relevant content.
Join our community on YouTube
Join the community of more than 15,000 #CubeAlumni experts including Andy Jassy, CEO of Amazon.com, Michael Dell, Founder and CEO of Dell Technologies, Pat Gelsinger, CEO of Intel, and many more luminaries and Experts.
“TheCUBE is an important partner of the industry. You guys are really a part of our events and we really appreciate you coming and I know people appreciate the content you create too” – Andy Jassy
THANKS
