Bruce Schneier Quotes
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Air travel survived decades of terrorism, including attacks which resulted in the deaths of everyone on the plane. It survived 9/11. It'll survive the next successful attack. The only real worry is that we'll scare ourselves into making air travel so onerous that we won't fly anymore.
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Chaos is hard to create, even on the Internet.
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It's certainly easier to implement bad security and make it illegal for anyone to notice than it is to implement good security.
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The very definition of news is something that hardly ever happens. If an incident is in the news, we shouldn't worry about it. It's when something is so common that its no longer news - car crashes, domestic violence - that we should worry.
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If the FBI parks a van bristling with cameras outside your house, you are justified in closing your blinds.
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Think of your existing power as the exponent in an equation that determines the value of information. The more power you have, the more additional power you derive from the new data.
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Given the credible estimate that we've spent $1 trillion on anti-terrorism security
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For if we are observed in all matters, we are constantly under threat of correction, judgment, criticism, even plagiarism of our own uniqueness. We become children, fettered under watchful eyes, constantly fearful that-either now or in the uncertain future-patterns we leave behind will be brought back to implicate us, by whatever authority has now become focused upon our once-private and innocent acts. We lose our individuality, because everything we do is observable and recordable.
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ID can be hijacked, and cards can be faked. All of the 9/11 terrorists had fake IDs, yet they still got on the planes. If the British national ID card can't be faked, it will be the first on the planet.
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Surveillance is the business model of the Internet.
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The user's going to pick dancing pigs over security every time.
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Anyone, from the most clueless amateur to the best cryptographer, can create an algorithm that he himself can't break.
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Computer security can simply be protecting your equipment and files from disgruntled employees, spies, and anything that goes bump in the night, but there is much more. Computer security helps ensure that your computers, networks, and peripherals work as expected all the time, and that your data is safe in the event of hard disk crash or a power failure resulting from an electrical storm. Computer security also makes sure no damage is done to your data and that no one is able to read it unless you want them to.
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Terrorism is a crime against the mind. We win by refusing fear.
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The fundamental driver in computer security, in all of the computer industry, is economics. That requires a lot of re-education for us security geeks.
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I am regularly asked what the average Internet user can do to ensure his security. My first answer is usually 'Nothing; you're screwed'.
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The question to ask when you look at security is not whether this makes us safer, but whether it's worth the trade-off.
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History has taught us: never underestimate the amount of money, time, and effort someone will expend to thwart a security system. It's always better to assume the worst. Assume your adversaries are better than they are. Assume science and technology will soon be able to do things they cannot yet. Give yourself a margin for error. Give yourself more security than you need today. When the unexpected happens, you'll be glad you did.
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It's frustrating; terrorism is rare and largely ineffectual, yet we regularly magnify the effects of both their successes and failures by terrorizing ourselves.
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Privacy is an inherent human right, and a requirement for maintaining the human condition with dignity and respect.
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If you think technology can solve your security problems, then you don't understand the problems and you don't understand the technology.
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Societies without a reservoir of people who don't follow the rules lack an important mechanism for societal evolution. Vibrant societies need a dishonest minority; if society makes its dishonest minority too small, it stifles dissent as well as common crime.
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Beware the Four Horsemen of the Information Apocalypse: terrorists, drug dealers, kidnappers, and child pornographers. Seems like you can scare any public into allowing the government to do anything with those four.
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Amateurs hack systems, professionals hack people.
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Choosing providers is not a choice between surveillance/not; it's just choosing which feudal lord gets to spy on you.
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The more we expect technology to protect us from people in the same way it protects us from nature, the more we will sacrifice the very values of our society in futile attempts to achieve this security.
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Don't make the mistake of thinking you're Facebook's customer, you're not - you're the product.
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Only amateurs attack machines; professionals target people.
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The whole notion of passwords is based on an oxymoron. The idea is to have a random string that is easy to remember. Unfortunately, if it's easy to remember, it's something nonrandom like 'Susan.' And if it's random, like 'r7U2*Qnp,' then it's not easy to remember.
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More people are killed every year by pigs than by sharks, which shows you how good we are at evaluating risk.
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