Death and the NSA: A Q&A With Bruce Schneier 149
Daniel_Stuckey writes "Since Edward Snowden's disclosures about widespread NSA surveillance, Americans and people everywhere have been presented with a digital variation on an old analog threat: the erosion of freedoms and privacy in exchange, presumably, for safety and security.
Bruce Schneier knows the debate well. He's an expert in cryptography and he wrote the book on computer security; Applied Cryptography is one of the field's basic resources, 'the book the NSA never wanted to be published,' raved Wired in 1994. He knows the evidence well too: lately he's been helping the Guardian and the journalist Glenn Greenwald review the documents they have gathered from Snowden, in order to help explain some of the agency's top secret and highly complex spying programs.
To do that, Schneier has taken his careful digital privacy regime to a new level, relying on a laptop with an encrypted hard drive that he never connects to the internet. That couldn't prevent a pilfered laptop during, say, a 'black bag operation,' of course. 'I know that if some government really wanted to get my data, there'd be little I could do to stop them,' he says."
Re:false flag? (Score:2, Informative)
queue the outrage!
Sorry, my outrage is strictly in a FIFO stack. I'm now scheduled to be outraged about (pop) let's see... orang-utans in Guatemala... who are (pop) racist against French children.
FIFO is queue. stack is LIFO.
Re:They already have his data (Score:3, Informative)
At least in this case it's fairly hard to see any other reason why the best selling and most popular book on cryptography shouldn't have been modernized.
Read his preface to Practical Cryptography and you'll get your reason. In a nutshell: so many people took Applied Cryptography, wrote code to do the ciphers, packaged a nice API, and then did shipped a bunch of information-leaky broken implementations that provided a false sense of security, that Schneier's followup work was more like "use THIS not THAT".