Editors' Rating
Published: 22 Oct 2008
One of the hidden dangers in today's financial crisis is that while it's consuming everyone's attention, other endemic problems will get lost in the shuffle. For that reason, the timing of the release of Bruce Schneier's latest book, a compilation of the many columns on security topics he's written over the six years between June 2002 and June 2008, could hardly be bettered.
It's easy to forget, with the headlines consumed by proposals to nationalise the banks, that also on the government's table are plans to store all the nation's communications data in a giant shed and roll out ID cards and several comprehensive citizen-tracking databases. The only good thing to be said for the financial crisis is that it may soak up the resources to pay for all this increased surveillance.
Not because terrorism isn't a genuine threat: of course it is. But — as Schneier repeatedly highlights — surveillance and data mining won't stop terrorists, although they will invade the privacy of ordinary citizens; airport security is 'security theater' designed more for show than for effect; and the two most effective measures taken since 9/11 are reinforcing cockpit doors and teaching passengers that passive acquiescence is no longer the right way to behave when a plane is hijacked. Those two changes cost hardly anything. The edifice that's been built in the name of security and the Iraq war have cost billions. Is this, Schneier asks, the best way we could have spent our money?
Any collection of columns is bound to have a good bit of repetition, and this one is no exception. The most frequently repeated phrase: 'security is a trade-off' (he helpfully counted them for me: 14 — 'I suppose it's my mantra').
Schneier has chosen to group his columns by topic. The 12 chapters contain varying numbers of pieces, none of them ordered chronologically. So in the election security chapter you jump from 2006 to 2003 and back to 2006 again. If you want to find a thread that follows the development of voting technology and its problems in the wake of the 2000 election, you must do it in your head.
Other broad topics include terrorism, ID cards, disasters, psychology, cybercrime and cyberwar, and the economics of security. Airline travel gets its own chapter — it's a particular obsession for anyone who travels regularly. Privacy and surveillance get both a chapter and another of Schneier's repeated aphorisms — that the face-off isn't, as commonly represented, between privacy and security but between liberty and control.
If there's a complaint to make about this book, it's that — other than a relatively brief introduction summarising the main themes — there's no new material. For those who don't subscribe to Schneier's free Crypto-Gram newsletter or chase from Wired News to The Guardian reading all his output, it's certainly convenient to have it all collected in one place. But books of columns are always improved by additional commentary outlining reader reactions, or explaining how the author's views may have changed or been enhanced in the light of subsequent events.
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