David A. Harding
Monday, 12 Jun 2006
About the no-fly list: ``These are people so dangerous, they cannot be allowed to fly no matter what, but so innocent they cannot be arrested!'' —Bruce Schneier, 10 June 2006
I enjoyed (The) security expert Bruce Schneier's speech at ACLU New Jersey's first annual membership conference. He started by speaking about the weakness of movie plot threat security: it ``only works if we guess [the plot] right.'' Then he said all security is about tradeoffs just like all consumerism is about tradeoffs: in essence we're security consumers and we have to decide, ``are we getting good value in the tradeoff?''
Mr. Schneier said security tradeoffs are intuitive. He asked us to imagine a rabbit, munching on food in the woods, that sees a fox: what does it do? Flee from the fox or continue eating? Rabbits that make good decisions about their security (welfare) will survive to reproduce and rabbits that make bad decisions will starve or get eaten.
If security tradeoffs are intuitive, why are so many bad decisions made? ``Because technology changes things,'' said Mr. Schneier. He told us about how electricity was shrouded in a veil of fear for the first generation of it's existence: people didn't understand it's dangers and they often overreacted, but after a generation, the risks of electricity became intuitive.
Then Mr. Schneier said, ``we don't get a generation [to adapt to new technologies] anymore.''
Worse, ``the media magnifies things by repeating them over and over again,'' Mr. Schneier said before advising: ``if it's in the news don't worry about it.'' By definition, what is reported in the news is rare. ``If there was a terrorist attack and nobody reported it, the effects would be greatly diminished.''
When creating or selecting a security solution, Mr. Schneier said everyone has an agenda. He said, ``an agenda is the non-security basis of security decisions.'' For example, ``I'm happy to give up your time for security,'' he said, but he's not as willing to give up his own time. He said the importance of agenda in security decisions is great: ``very often the non-security reasons [for selecting a security solution] greatly outweigh the security reasons.''
Mr. Schneier warned: ``the agenda of police is a police state.'' He said police want to violate your rights and politicians today are willing to give them that power. Defending civil liberties is, ``like playing a giant game of wack-a-mole.''