Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World

by Bruce Schneier

Overview

You are under surveillance right now.

Your cell phone provider tracks your location and knows who’s with you. Your online and in-store purchasing patterns are recorded, and reveal if you're unemployed, sick, or pregnant. Your e-mails and texts expose your intimate and casual friends. Google knows what you’re thinking because it saves your private searches. Facebook can determine your sexual orientation without you ever mentioning it.

The powers that surveil us do more than simply store this information. Corporations use surveillance to manipulate not only the news articles and advertisements we each see, but also the prices we’re offered. Governments use surveillance to discriminate, censor, chill free speech, and put people in danger worldwide. And both sides share this information with each other or, even worse, lose it to cybercriminals in huge data breaches.

Much of this is voluntary: we cooperate with corporate surveillance because it promises us convenience, and we submit to government surveillance because it promises us protection. The result is a mass surveillance society of our own making. But have we given up more than we’ve gained? In Data and Goliath, security expert Bruce Schneier offers another path, one that values both security and privacy. He shows us exactly what we can do to reform our government surveillance programs and shake up surveillance-based business models, while also providing tips for you to protect your privacy every day. You'll never look at your phone, your computer, your credit cards, or even your car in the same way again.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393244816
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	03/02/2015
Pages:	400
Product dimensions:	6.50(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.40(d)

About the Author

Bruce Schneier is “one of the world’s foremost security experts” (Wired), a “security guru” (Economist), and the best-selling author of thirteen books. He is a Fellow and lecturer at the Harvard Kennedy School and the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society and a board member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Access Now, and the Tor Project.

Table of Contents

Introduction 1

Part 1 The World We're Creating

1 Data as a By-product of Computing 15

2 Data as Surveillance 23

3 Analyzing Our Data 39

4 The Business of Surveillance 54

5 Government Surveillance and Control 73

6 Consolidation of Institutional Control 92

Part 2 What's at Stake

7 Political Liberty and Justice 107

8 Commercial Fairness and Equality 127

9 Business Competitiveness 140

10 Privacy 147

11 Security 158

Part 3 What to Do About It

12 Principles 181

13 Solutions for Government 195

14 Solutions for Corporations 223

15 Solutions for the Rest of Us 250

16 Social Norms and the Big Data Trade-off 265

Acknowledgments 281

Notes 285

Index 407

Editorial Reviews

03/16/2015
Security technologist Schneier (Schneier on Security) eloquently limns the challenges of maintaining privacy in the Internet age, and offers some thoughtful proposals to preserve individual freedom without compromising national security. Even readers well versed in the issues are likely to be shocked by some instances of technological intrusions, such as when a school district near Philadelphia lent high school students laptops installed with highly invasive spyware. Schneier plausibly makes the case that the powerful algorithms of companies such as Facebook could be used to actually manipulate American elections. The book also notes the psychological aspects of the loss of control of one's data. For example, for most of human history "interactions and conversations have been ephemeral," and the indefinite preservation of online interactions has social and emotional repercussions for which society is unprepared. Schneier may be accused by some of minimizing the threat from terrorism, however, as when he dismisses terrorists as no more of a danger than organized crime, an analogy that weakens the overall strength of his case. (Mar.)

Publishers Weekly

Bruce Schneier has written a hugely insightful and important book about how big data and its cousin, mass surveillance, affect our lives, and what to do about it. In characteristic fashion, Schneier takes very complex and varied information and ideas and makes them vivid, accessible, and compelling.

Jack Goldsmith

A pithy, pointed, and highly readable explanation of what we know in the wake of the Snowden revelations, with practical steps that ordinary people can take if they want to do something about the threats to privacy and liberty posed not only by the government but by the Big Data industry.

Neal Stephenson

Paints a picture of the big-data revolution that is dark, but compelling; one in which the conveniences of our digitized world have devalued privacy.

Charles Seife - Nature

When it comes to what government and business are doing together and separately with personal data scooped up from the ether, Mr. Schneier is as knowledgeable as it gets…. Mr. Schneier’s use of concrete examples of bad behavior with data will make even skeptics queasy and potentially push the already paranoid over the edge. Mr. Schneier writes clearly and simply about a complex subject.

Jonathan A. Knee - The New York Times

The public conversation about surveillance in the digital age would be a good deal more intelligent if we all read Bruce Schneier first.

Malcolm Gladwell

As it becomes increasingly clear that surveillance has surpassed anything that Orwell imagined, we need a guide to how and why we’re being snooped and what we can do about it. Bruce Schneier is that guide—step by step he outlines the various ways we are being monitored, and after scaring the pants off us, he tells us how to fight back.

Steven Levy

The internet is a surveillance state, and like any technology, surveillance has both good and bad uses. Bruce Schneier draws on his vast range of technical and historical skills to sort them out. He analyzes both the challenge of big brother and many little brothers. Anyone interested in security, liberty, privacy, and justice in this cyber age must read this book.

Joseph S. Nye Jr.

Lucid, sophisticated… Finely constructed, free of cant, and practical in its conclusions.

Jacob Silverman - Los Angeles Times

Does a fine job of laying out the problems…[and] offers a deep but accessible look at surveillance in the post-Snowden, big-data era.

The Economist

A judicious and incisive analysis of one of the most pressing new issues of our time, written by a true expert.

Steven Pinker

Schneier exposes the many and surprising ways governments and corporations monitor all of us, providing a must-read Users Guide to life in the Data Age. His recommendations for change should be part of a much needed public debate.

Richard A. Clarke

Schneier did not need the Snowden revelations, as important as they are, to understand the growing threat to personal privacy worldwide from government and corporate surveillance—he’s been raising the alarm for nearly two decades. But this important book does more than detail the threat; it tells the average low-tech citizen what steps he or she can take to limit surveillance, and thus fight those are seeking to strip privacy from all of us.

Seymour M. Hersh

08/01/2015
Analyzes how tracking metadata and user profiles in the networked age can be employed for control. (LJ 6/15/15)

Library Journal

2015-01-22
A jeremiad suggesting our addiction to data may have made privacy obsolete.Prolific technological writer Schneier (Fellow/Berkman Center for Internet and Society, Harvard Law School; Carry On: Sound Advice from Schneier on Security, 2013, etc.) clearly examines how technology has transformed every interaction, noting how our intimate communications are now "saved in ways we have no control over." He suggests that most Americans remain unconcerned about the relationship between data and surveillance, due to the attraction of "free" products like Gmail. He focuses on the social costs of surveillance, which "puts us at risk of abuses by those in power…exacerbated by the fact that we are generating so much data and storing it indefinitely." He also argues that this "pervasive mass surveillance" will inevitably chill progressive movements—e.g., gay rights and cannabis decriminalization. The problem is more sprawling than most realize: Edward Snowden's revelations clarified "how much the NSA relies on US corporations to eavesdrop on the Internet," and corporations are using such technologies for their own ends. Yet both the NSA and corporations are blithe about how they treat the fruits of this nonstop spying. "From the military's perspective," writes the author, "it's not surveillance until a human being looks at the data." Such strange pronouncements about the common good are hard to counter, since whistleblowers such as Snowden are prohibited from explaining their actions in court. Schneier argues that all this invasion of privacy is unlikely to succeed in its alleged goal: "Even highly accurate terrorism prediction systems will be so flooded with false alarms that they will be useless." He concludes this grim catalog of privacy erosion with a set of prescriptions for governments, corporations and "the rest of us," advocating a mix of legal framework, incentives for fairer business models and a more realistic understanding of the current moment's potential for harm. An accessible, detailed look at a disturbing aspect of contemporary life.

Kirkus Review

When it comes to what government and business are doing together and separately with personal data scooped up from the ether, Mr. Schneier is as knowledgeable as it gets…. Mr. Schneier’s use of concrete examples of bad behavior with data will make even skeptics queasy and potentially push the already paranoid over the edge.

Jonathan A. Knee - New York Times

Should be on everyone's must read list.

Om Malik

[T]hought-provoking, absorbing, and comprehensive.

Gil Press - Forbes

Lucid and compelling.

Emily Parker - Washington Post

Bruce Schneier's new book will empower people to join the conversation in the courts and elsewhere about how to think seriously and honestly about our current digital surveillance state and more importantly, how to build a digital society run by the consent of the governed.

Cindy Cohn

Lucid and fast-paced…. Schneier describes with dismay the erosion of privacy, then lays out a strategy for turning the tide.

Hiawatha Bray - Boston Globe

The indispensable guide to understanding the most important current threat to freedom in democratic market societies.

Yochai Benkler

Like the great artists of other centuries, he engages the heart as well as the intelligence; his genius strikes, undismayed as Theseus, through the labyrinths of our life and time to the accomplishment of new, inspiring and stunningly beautiful work.

Xeni Jardin

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