Writer, blogger, and author Wendy Grossman, author of net.wars joins Plutopians for a conversation about hacking with Bruce Schneier, an internationally renowned computer security professional and author. Bruce's latest book, A Hacker's Mind: How the Powerful Bend Society's Rules, and How to Bend Them Back, is an expanded view of hacks and hackers beyond computers to other kinds of systems, from tax laws to financial markets to politics.

Bruce Schneier:

Things like https are now everywhere. Google is securing email between itself and the other major email providers. And a lot of the passive methods that the NSA used ten years ago aren't working today. Now, the flip side of this is corporate surveillance has gone from zero to sixty over those ten years, and now, if you are a government, and you want to surveil somebody, you tell Facebook to tell you what they know about them. Or Google, or Apple, or any of those companies.

Resources

* Bruce Schneier's website, Schneier on Security

* Wendy Grossman's review of A Hacker's Mind

Some other books by Bruce Schneier:

* Beyond Fear: Thinking Sensibly About Security in an Uncertain World 2003

* Liars and Outliers: Enabling the Trust that Society Needs to Thrive, 2012

* Data and Goliath, 2015

* Click Here to Kill Everybody, 2018

Mentioned in the discussion:

* Angela Sasse

* Moral Crumple Zones

* Nick Bostrom "Ethical Issues in Advanced Artificial Intelligence"

Photograph by Rama, Wikimedia Commons, Cc-by-sa-2.0-fr