BruceSchneier

Bruce Schneier Blazes Through Your Questions

Trechos de Bruce Schneier Blazes Through Your Questions:

  As technology becomes more complicated, society's experts become more specialized.
  And in almost every area, those with the expertise to build society¿s infrastructure
  also have the expertise to destroy it. Ask any doctor how to poison someone untraceably,
  and he can tell you. Ask someone who works in aircraft maintenance how to drop a 747
  out of the sky without getting caught, and he¿ll know. Now ask any Internet security
  professional how to take down the Internet, permanently. I've heard about half a dozen
  different ways, and I know I haven¿t exhausted the possibilities.

  [...]

  There's a huge difference between nosy neighbors and cameras. Cameras are everywhere.
  Cameras are always on. Cameras have perfect memory. It¿s not the surveillance we¿ve
  been used to; it's wholesale surveillance. I wrote about this here, and said this:
  "Wholesale surveillance is a whole new world. It's not 'follow that car', it's
  'follow every car.' The National Security Agency can eavesdrop on every phone call,
  looking for patterns of communication or keywords that might indicate a conversation
  between terrorists. Many airports collect the license plates of every car in their
  parking lots, and can use that database to locate suspicious or abandoned cars.
  Several cities have stationary or car-mounted license-plate scanners that keep
  records of every car that passes, and save that data for later analysis.

  More and more, we leave a trail of electronic footprints as we go through our daily
  lives. We used to walk into a bookstore, browse, and buy a book with cash. Now we
  visit Amazon, and all of our browsing and purchases are recorded. We used to throw
  a quarter in a toll booth; now EZ Pass records the date and time our car passed
  through the booth. Data about us are collected when we make a phone call, send an
  e-mail message, make a purchase with our credit card, or visit a Web site.

  What's happening is that we are all effectively under constant surveillance. No one
  is looking at the data most of the time, but we can all be watched in the past,
  present, and future. And while mining this data is mostly useless for finding
  terrorists (I wrote about that here[1]), it's very useful in controlling a
  population. 

  Cameras are just one piece of this, but they¿re an important piece. And what¿s at
  stake is a massive loss of personal privacy, which I believe[2] has significant
  societal ramifications.

  [...]

  What I said earlier applies here, too; it¿s impossible to function in modern
  society without leaving electronic footprints on the Web or in real life.

  [1] http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/03/data_mining_for.html
  [2] http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/05/the_value_of_pr.html

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