The government doesn’t build its own surveillance apparatus-it hacks, bribes, threatens or sweet-talks its way into the giant Internet companies and telcos’ data-centers, and snaffles up all the data they gather on us. Spooks leave their jobs and go to work in industry. People from industry go to work for spook agencies. He starts by demolishing the idea that we should be worried about government surveillance but not corporate surveillance, or vice-versa. Why is that surprising? Because when you look at the changes to personal, social, political, legal and technical reality that we need to make to get to a point where mass surveillance is remembered as an unfortunate aberration in our history, it’s hard to hold out hope.īut Schneier offers hope. The final third of the book is devoted, surprisingly, to practical solutions to the surveillance conundrum. Schneier’s answer to the “nothing to hide, nothing to fear” argument is particularly good here. Whatever the “Internet of Things” ends up being, it will put more surveillance opportunities into our lives than ever before, and more potential for harm. The world is not becoming less computerized, after all. Schneier starts with the nature of data and surveillance in the Internet age, the way that data use and abuse can empower us or harm us (both individually or as a society), patiently steps through a condensed (but still representative) account of the leaks, and then combines all this in a powerful argument that out-of-control, unaccountable, mass-scale surveillance has harmed us, and presents an existential threat to a good, safe and just society. Since the first Snowden leaks, we’ve been buffeted by new revelations that made it hard-even impossible-to understand exactly what kind of spying was taking place, under whose oversight, and what effect it was having. It’s been nearly two years since the Snowden revelations, and we’re nowhere near figuring out what to make of his revelations, but now there’s a book that collects all the most significant facts, implications and insights from the debates and packages them in a way that is accessible, smart, and important. No one explains security, privacy, crypto and safety better than Bruce Schneier, and while he’s been talking about this subject for decades, it’s never been more relevant, as his new guide to the post-Snowden world Data and Goliath demonstrates. Bruce Schneier's Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World (Book Review)
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