CHRIS PELICANO: Good afternoon,
everyone. My name is Chris Pelicano. I'm the security engineering
manager here at Google. Very briefly, I will introduce
our guest this afternoon. He's a blogger. Most of you know him
from schneier.com. He's an author. Many works including "Liars and
Outliers," which he'll be talking about today. Ladies and gentlemen,
Bruce Schneier. [APPLAUSE] BRUCE SCHNEIER: If you put that
near me, there's feedback and it's all bad. Hi, thanks. I'm actually not going to talk
about my book, because I figure if you want to hear about
it, you can read it. I'd rather talk about stuff that
I've been thinking about since that. This is very much ideas in
progress, which makes it good for a talk here. I'm always interested in
feedback and comments, and there will be time for that. What I want to talk about is
security and power because I think that is a lot of what's
interesting right now, and going on right now. So basically, technologies
are disruptive. They disrupt society by
disrupting power balances. And you can look at the history
of the plow, or the stirrup, or gun powder, the
printing press, telegraph, radio, airplane, container
shipping, disease resistant, drought resistant wheat and
see how those technologies changed the balance of power. And there's a lot written
about this-- written as history. Harder is doing this
in the present-- which is really what I'm
thinking about-- on the internet. The internet is incredibly
disruptive. We've seen entire industries
disappear. We've seen entire industries
created. We've seen industries upended. We've seen the computer
industry, itself, upended several times. Government has changed a lot. We see governments losing power
as citizens organize. We're seeing political movements
become easier. We're seeing totalitarian
states use power. Really, the Obama campaign was
revolutionary in how they used the internet to organize
and engage people. You could look at how technology
has changed the media, ranging from the
24-hour news cycle, to bloggers, and citizen
journalism, and two-way communications, and the acute
explosion of media sources, social power-- there's
a lot here-- personal publishing,
the internet email, criminal power-- certain crimes becoming
easier-- identity theft, which is really
impersonation fraud done to scale, and how the
internet has changed things. And I think about how this
affects computer security-- which is basically what I do-- and then, how that affects
the rest of the world. So traditionally, computer
security has had the model of the user takes care of it. That's been the traditional
model. It's actually a very
strange model. We are selling products that
aren't secure, aren't any good, and expect the user
to make them good. I think of it as an automobile
manufacturer, when they sell you a car, saying, that car
doesn't come with breaks. But brakes are really important,
and we think you should have them. There's some good aftermarket
dealers. But you should get some break
installed pretty quickly, maybe on the drive home. It's a much safer
car that way. In a lot of ways, that's what
we would do with anti-virus, with firewalls. We would sell these products and
expect the user to do it themselves, to have some level
of expertise necessary to secure their environment. There's a lot of reasons
why we did this. It's the speed of
our industry. It's the youth of
our industry. But it was the norm. That model is breaking. That model is less becoming
the norm. It's changing, not because
we've realized there are better ways to do security, but
because of how computers and the net are working today. There are two trends that, I
think, change this model. The first is cloud computing. Now on the one hand, cloud
computing isn't anything new. In the '60s, we called
it time sharing. In the '80s, we called
it client server. In the '90s-- I had a company-- we
called it managed security or managed services. It's, fundamentally, a balance
between the cost of computation and the cost
of data transport. In the '60s, computation's very
expensive, so it makes sense to centralize computers in
their own rooms with their own air conditioning and
give people badges. In the '80s, what becomes
expensive is large storage, so you end up with a client
server model. In the '90s, it's
more services. Right now, the cost of computing
is really dropping towards free. The cost of transport is
dropping towards free. So what makes sense economically
is to put your computers on the places on the
planet where they can be run the most cheaply, and access
them from wherever you are. That seems to be the endgame. There's nothing cheaper
than free. The times where you see
computation pushed to the edges are places where you
have relatively low bandwidth-- maybe mobile applications-- or relatively high
need for local computation, like gaming. But even those are becoming
more of a cloud model. So that's the first trend. The second trend is locked
down endpoints. And I think this is more of a
trend in businesses than in technology. But nowadays, the computing
platforms we buy, we have much less control over. I have an iPhone. I can't clear my cookies
on an iPhone. I can't get a program
that does that. I can't even get a program that
erases files, because I don't have direct control
over the memory map. There's weird things going
on in your system. FEMALE SPEAKER: I know. I'm trying to deal with it. BRUCE SCHNEIER: Wow. She's solving on her laptop. OK. All right, go. MALE SPEAKER: Do you want
to borrow this? BRUCE SCHNEIER: So these end
user devices, whether they are tablets, or phones, or Kindles,
the user has much less control over. On a Kindle, updates are
downloaded automatically and I can't even say yes. At least, on the iPhone,
I can say yes or no. But I still don't have anywhere
near the control I have on my OSs. OSs are moving that
direction as well. Both Windows 8 and Mountain
Lion are moving to the direction of these mobile
platforms, to give the user less control. And I think this is just
purely economics. The companies have realized that
the more they can control the supply chain, the
better they'll do. So whether it's Apple, with
their Apple store-- however the system works, you're
just better off if you can control as much of the
environment as possible. So this brings us to a new
model of security. And the model is someone
else takes care of it. The model is it just happens
automatically, by magic. This happens on my
Gmail account. I have no control over
Gmail security. I have to simply trust
that Google does it. I have no control over my
pictures on Flickr, or my Facebook account, any
of that stuff. And I have less and less control
over the devices where I view these things. So users have to trust vendors
to a degree we hadn't, before. There are a lot of good reasons
why we do this. All the reasons why these
models make sense-- convenience, redundancy,
automation, the ability to share things. And the trust can be
surprisingly complete. We're living in a world where
Facebook mediates all of our friend interactions. Already, Google knows more about
my interests than my wife does, which is a
little bit freaky. Google knows what kind of porn
every American likes, which is really freaky. But it's a trade off. It's a trade off we actually
do pretty willingly. We give up some control in
exchange for the environment that works well for us. And we trust that the vendors
will treat us well, and protect us from harm. On the other hand, we're running
out of other options. For most everybody, there
aren't any real, viable alternatives. I run Eudora, but I'm,
increasingly, a freak. My mother has a way better time
on her computer since she got an Apple and has Apple
handling every part of her computing environment. She loses a phone, she
gets a new one. It just works great. And most of us can't
do it ourselves. This is becoming more
and more complex. I can't offer advice to
tell people to run their own mail servers. That didn't make sense
20 years ago. It really doesn't
make sense now. And you can't run your
own Facebook. So the model I think of when
I think of this type of computing environment
is feudal security-- and that's "feudal" with a "d,"
and not with a "t." It's that we, as users, have to
pledge our allegiance to some powerful company who, in turn,
promises to protect us. And I like it as a metaphor both
because there's a real, rich historical metaphor, and
because everyone's watching "Game of Thrones." So you can
pull from both sources. And if you go back to classic,
medieval feudalism, it was a system designed for a dangerous
environment where you needed someone more
powerful than you to protect you. It was a series of hierarchical
relationships. There were obligations
in both directions. It was actually a pretty complex
political system. And I see more of it permeating
the environment that we work in today. It has its advantages. For most people, the cloud
providers are better at security than they are. Automatic cloud backup
is fantastic. Automatic updates
is fantastic. All these things are good. So feudal security provides this
level of security that most everybody is below. So it will raise them up to
whatever level the providers are providing. For those up here, it
lowers them down. And where you see barriers to
people adopting this are things like the banks, who,
naturally, have a higher level of security, and don't
want to go down. I assume that at some point, we
are going to see a business model of a high security
cloud vendor-- whether it's a Dropbox
or an email service-- just something for some
of these more high assurance users. We also have the problem
of regulation. For a lot of companies, they
have auditing reporting requirements. And if you go to Dropbox and
say, we're using you for our company, we need to audit your
system, they will say, go away, or to Rackspace. I assume we're going to see
some water flow auditing model, where the Rackspace audit
flows down to whatever service works on top of that,
which flows down to whatever company now uses that service. Because I think we
have to solve the regulatory barriers, here. Feudal security has risks. The vendors are going to act
in their self interest. You hope that their self
interest dovetails with your self interest, but that's
not always the case. It's much less the case when
you're not paying for the service, when, in fact, you are
a user, not a customer. As we see, vendors will make
side deals with the government. And the legal regime
is different. If the data is in your
premises, then it's in their premises. Vendors can act arbitrarily. Vendors can make mistakes. And vendors have an incentive
to keep users tied to themselves. You guys are an exception by
allowing users to take their data and leave. Most companies don't do that. Because tying the data to the
company increases lock in, increases the value
of the company. So this model is inherently
based on trust. It's inherently based
on the companies-- the feudal lords-- convincing the users to trust
them with their data, their photos, their friends--
with everything. And unfortunately, the business
model for a lot of these companies is basically
betraying that trust for profit. And that is, depending on which
company, more or less transparent, more
or less salient. A lot of effort does go into
hiding that fact, to pretending it's not true. And as it turned out, these
companies have a side business betraying the trust to
the government, too. So there is a little bit, or
in some cases, a lot, of deceit that this is
all based on. And I do worry about how
long that can sustain. Some of it, it seems to be
able to be sustained indefinitely. For others, I'm not so sure. The feudal model is also
inherently based on power. And that's what I'm thinking
is interesting, right now. And it does dovetail very
nicely with the current alignment of power
on the internet-- the rise of the controlled
endpoints, and the third party holding your data-- those two different polls. So I started the talk by
mentioning about the internet changing power. And if you look back at history
of the internet, a lot of us thought that it would flow
in a certain direction. The internet was really designed
in the way that made most technical sense. There wasn't a lot of agenda
placed on the net, as it was first designed. And if you look back at the
literature around that time, you read about the natural laws
of the internet, that the internet works a certain way
because it's like gravity. It's just the way
it has to work. It's the way that makes sense. And a lot of us thought this was
inevitable, this was the way the world had to work. I have two quotes. One is John Perry Barlow. In 1996, he's addressing the
World Economic Forum. And he has something called
"The Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace,"
which is a great document to read. And he's telling governments
things like, "You have no moral right to rule us, nor do
you possess any methods of enforcement we have reason to
fear." Three years earlier, John Gilmore writes that, "The
internet interprets censorship as damage, and routes
around it." These are very Utopian
quotes, but we all believed them back then. We believed that is how the
internet works, that the internet takes the masses, makes
them powerful, takes the governments and makes
them powerless. It turns out, that's
just not true. That's not the way it works. What the internet
does, like many technologies, is magnify power. It magnifies power,
in general. And what happened is, when the
powerless discovered the internet, suddenly
they had power. The hackers, the dissidents,
the criminals, the disenfranchised-- as those marginal groups
discovered the net, suddenly, they had power they didn't
have before. And the change was fast,
and it was stark. But when powerful interests
realized the potential of the internet, they had more
power to magnify. They were much slower, but
their ability to use the internet to increase their
power is greater. The unorganized were more nimble
and quick, and the institutions were slower
and more effective. And that's where we are today. So I look around and I
see four classes of internet tools of power. And what's interesting about
them is they all are tools by which a totalitarian government
can increase their power, but they all have viable market reasons for existing. So censorship is also a content
filtering, or data loss prevention. Propaganda is marketing. Surveillance is surveillance. I guess, personal
data collecting. Surveillance is the business
model the internet. Use control-- in China, programs have to be
certified by the government in order to be used on computers
there, which sounds an awful lot like the Apple store. I mean we laugh, but
this is important. We're building tools that have
very different sorts of uses depending on who's using
them, and why. And in both the government and
the corporate sphere, powerful interests are gaining power
with these tools. Censorship and surveillance
are both on the rise. The internet censorship
project, which tracks censorship around the world,
finds more of it every year. We see more surveillance by
governments every year, even before the United States stuff
that happened two weeks ago. More personal data is being
collected and correlated. More control over our hardware
and software. Less purchasing, more
licensing-- we saw Adobe move
to that model. This is getting harder. I'm trying to find a taskless
productivity tool, and I can't find a good one that doesn't
require me to use the cloud. And we have corporations-- I think Facebook is one
interesting example-- that are actually changing
social norms. They are affecting what people
think is normal, is regular, for a profit motive. I think propaganda is something
we don't talk about a lot, but it's both in
companies and governments. I mean we might call it viral
marketing, and there are some cute names for it, but
basically, it's propaganda. And we're seeing more
and more of it. And now, we're at the point
where power basically controls everyone's data. Because in a lot of ways,
personal data equals power, both on the government side
and the corporate side. Even in non-internet businesses,
the need to own the relationship, to know more
about the customer, is driving a lot of data collection, and
all that back end correlation. And I worry a lot about the
commingling of corporate and government interests here. We live in a world-- I don't have to go through the
details-- of ubiquitous surveillance. Basically, everything
is collected. Charlie Strauss has written
about this as the end of pre-history, that sometime in
our lifetime we're going to switch from pre-history, where
only some things were saved, to actual history, where
everything is saved. Now, we're in a world where
most everything is saved. And what's happening now-- and I
think it's something I'm not happy about, but try
to understand-- is how powerful interests are
trying to steer this. I mentioned Facebook changing
social norms. But we're seeing industries
lobbying for laws to make their business models
more profitable. So that's laws to prevent
digital copying, laws to reduce privacy, laws allowing
different businesses to control bandwidth. And on the government side,
we're seeing international bodies trying to get rulings to
make the internet easier to surveil, and to sensor. I've heard this called "cyber
nationalism." And last November in Dubai, there was a
meeting of the ITU-- that's the International
Telecommunications Union. Those are the guys that
run the phone system. They're not really very tech
savvy, but they are very international. They are very non-US centric. And they want to wrest control
of the internet from the US. For a lot of reasons, I think
this would be a disaster. But there's a strong push. And unfortunately-- I wrote this in my
blog, today-- I think all the Snowden
documents make their case a lot easier. Because now, when they say,
well you can't trust the Americans, everyone will say,
oh yeah, you're right. You can't trust the Americans. So these things are
happening now. We're seeing a large rise in the
increase of militarization of cyberspace, which will push
more of the internet under government control. I very much believe we are
in the middle of a cyber war arms race. And it's heated up a
little bit in the past couple of weeks. Because we've been complaining
about China for the past few years. I've always assumed we've
been giving as good as we're getting. And now, we're getting data that
we are giving as good as we're getting, which is just
going to make things worse. We're pretty sure that the cyber
attack against the Saudi oil company Aramco was
launched by Iran in retaliation for Stuxnet, which
sounds complicated. But I don't know geopolitics. Maybe that makes sense. And we're seeing a lot of
alignment of corporate and government power. I'm pretty sure I'm quoted in
"The New York Times," today, as calling Facebook "the NSA's
wet dream." I'm surprised I used those words. It was probably a
long interview. So here's a way to
think of it. In our country, we have two
different types of law. There's constitutional law,
that regulates what governments do, and there's
regulatory law, that constrains what corporations
so. And they're kind of separate. We're now living in a world
where each group has learned to use the other's law to get
around its own restrictions. If the government said, you
all have to carry tracking devices 24/7, that would
be unconstitutional. They could never get
away with it. Yet, we all carry cell phones. If they all said, you must
register whenever you meet a new friend, we'd
never allow it. Yet, we all go on Facebook. And actually, I played
this earlier. Two years ago, "The Onion"
did a video. Just go to YouTube and type "the
onion facebook cia." It's a short news video
about Facebook being the new CIA program. It's hysterical. And is two years old, which
makes it kind of sad. On the other hand, we're seeing
corporations use the governments to enforce their
business models. If, I don't know, the movie
industry said that we're going to go into people's computers
that trash them if we think they're copying files,
that would be wrong. But they're going to
try to get a law to do the same thing. Copyright-- a lot of examples where
industries are bypassing their own problems by going
through government. And I think this only gets
exacerbated as there's more technology. Feudal lords get
more powerful. And some of that is just the
natural order of bigness in our society right now. The way technology is right
now, it favors the big. It doesn't favor many small. It favors two or three on
top and nobody else. And it's true in geopolitics,
too. Think about it. In any climate change
negotiation on the planet, who do you think has more power-- Exxon or Bolivia? It's not even close. Who has more power-- Exxon or the United States? That's actually a discussion. This is weird. So that's one trajectory. There's another trajectory. There's a counterbalancing
one, based on different natural laws of technology. So in the book I'm not talking
about, "Liars and Outliers," I discuss something called
a security gap. And in that book, I'm talking
about, effectively, the arms race between attackers and
defenders, and that technology causes disruptions in that arms
race, and then, there's a rebalancing. So firearms are invented,
fingerprint technologies are invented. All those things upset
the balance between attackers and defenders. And one of things I point out
is that, as technology advances, attackers have
a natural advantage. Some of it's a basic first
mover advantage. But in general, unorganized
attackers can make use of innovations faster. So imagine someone invents
the motor car. And the police say,
well that's a really interesting thing. We could use one of those. So they have a group to study
the automobile, and they produce an RFP, and they get
bids, and they pick an automobile manufacturer, they
get a car, they have a training system. Meanwhile, the burglar says,
oh look, a new getaway vehicle, and can, much more
quickly, use that. We saw that on the internet. And if you remember, as soon
as the internet became a commercial entity, we saw a new
breed of cyber criminal appear organically, out of the
ground, immediately able to commit crimes, and fraud,
and identity theft. All of these new things
just showed up. Meanwhile, the police, who
were trained on Agatha Christie novels, took, what,
10 years to figure it out. And they have figured it out. But if you were around during
that time, it was really painful, as they had no
idea what cyber crime was, or how it worked. So there's this delay when
a new technology appears. And that's what I think
of as a security gap-- the delay between when the
non-powerful can make use of the new technology-- the fast and nimble-- and when the powerful, the big
and ponderous, can make use of the technology. And that gap gives attackers
a natural advantage. And I'll spare you the details,
but basically, that gap tends to be greater when
there's more technology-- when your curve is greater. And it's greater in times
of rapid technological-- actually, it's greater in times
of rapid social change due to technological change. And today, we're living in a
world with more technology than ever before, and greater
ramp of social change, due to technological change,
than ever before. So we're seeing an ever
increasing security gap. So this is the big question
that I do not have an answer to-- who wins? Who wins, and in what
circumstance? Does big, slow power beat
small, nimble power? And there's going to be some
David and Goliath metaphor, or Robin Hood and sheriff. I guess I'm going to need a
more medieval metaphor. But that seems like an open
question that we don't know. So for example, in Syria,
recently, we saw the Syrian dissidents use Facebook
to organize. We saw the Syrian government
use Facebook to arrest dissidents. So right now, it's
kind of a mess. As this shakes out, who
gets the upper hand? Right now, it seems like
governments do. It seems like the ability to
collect, to analyze, to employ police beats dissidents. It seems like the big
corporations win. That the need to have a credit
card, or be on Facebook, and to do all these things to live
your life are such that you can't shut them off. And they win. But it's not clear to me. It does seem clear to me that
those that want to get around the systems always
will be able to. But really, I'm now concerned
about everyone in the middle. The nimble are here. The powerful are here. Here's the rest of us,
which, I guess, is the hapless peasants. And as the powerful get more
control, I think we get largely left out of
any negotiations. And you see this in arbitrary
rules, in arbitrary terms of service. You see this in secret NSA
spying programs, or secret overrides to rules, and power
aligning with power. It's not clear to me that
these actually do catch terrorists. It's pretty clear to me that
they don't, actually. But they do affect
the rest of us. And I think these power issues
are going to affect all of the discussions we have about the
future of the internet in the coming decade. Because these are actually
complex issues. We have to decide how we balance
personal privacy against law enforcement. How do we balance them when
we want to prevent copy protection, or prevent
child pornography? When we decide, is it acceptable
for us to be judged by computer algorithms. Is it acceptable to feed
us search results? To loan us money for a house? To search us at airports? To convict us of
drunk driving? How do these algorithms
affect us? Do we have the right to correct
data about ourselves, or to delete it? Do we want computers
to forget? There's a lot of social
lubricant in our society by the fact that we are a
forgetting species. Do you really want-- I mean, I don't want Google
Glass because I don't my wife to be able to pull
up old arguments. That seems bad. There's a lot of power
struggles. And there are bigger
ones coming. Cory Doctorow writes about the
coming battles having to do with 3D printing. And they're very much the same
as the copyright battles. There will be powerful interests
that want to stop the execution of certain
data files. It was music and movies. In the future, it will
be working guns. It will be the Nike swoosh. His favorite example is
anatomically correct, interchangeable Barbie torsos,
which I never thought of, but would freak out Mattel,
probably, rightly so. Or little statues of Mickey
Mouse, which will freak out a very powerful company. RECORDED VOICE: Of
Mickey Mouse BRUCE SCHNEIER: Who is that? We see some incredibly
destabilizing technologies coming. And this whole debate on weapons
of mass destruction-- nuclear, chemical,
biological-- the idea is that, as technology
magnifies power, society can deal with
fewer bad events. So if the average bad guy-- I'm just going to make this up--
can kill 10 people before he's captured, or rob 10 houses
before he's captured, we could handle so
many robbers. But if they can now do 100 times
as much damage, we now need only 1/100 of them
to maintain the same security level. A lot of our security is
based on having some low level of badness. But as power magnifies the
amount of badness each individual can do, you suddenly
start needing much more control. I'm not even convinced
that that will work. But that's going to
be a huge debate. And that's going to
push fear buttons. Today, largely, the powerful
are winning these debates. And I worry that these
are actually very complicated issues. They required meaningful
debate, international cooperation, innovative
solutions, which doesn't sound like I just described
the US government. But we're going to
have to do this. In a lot of ways, the internet
is a fortuitous accident. It is a combination of lack
of commercial interests, government benign neglect,
some military core requirements for survivability
and resilience, and computer engineers with vaguely
libertarian leanings, doing what made technical sense. That was, kind of, the
stew of the internet. And that stew is gone. There are policy battles going
on, right now, over the future of the internet, in legislatures
around the world, in international standards
bodies, in international organizations. And I'm not sure how this is
all going to play out. But I have some suggestions
for different people. For researchers, I want to see a
lot more research into these technologies of social
control-- surveillance, censorship,
propaganda, and use control. And especially for you guys at
Google, you're in a unique position to study propaganda. There is very little work being
done on recognizing propaganda. And what I want is for my
internet to come with all propaganda with a little yellow
box, kind of like what you do on your search pages. My paid commercial is
flagged as such. I would like to be done
automatically. This seems vaguely impossible,
but I think we need to start thinking about it. There is some research done
around the edges. There's research done in
recognizing fake Yelp reviews, recognizing fake
Amazon reviews. But there's, right now,
questions whether trending topics on Twitter
is being gamed. So when we're losing this
transparency, there's a lot of questions about the information
we get. But I think we need research. Because those four
things are going to become very important. And understanding how they work,
and how to get around them, is going to become
very important. We need safe places to
anonymously publish. Wikileaks was great, but
now seems no more. Right now, the best thing we
have is something called Strongbox, that "The New
Yorker" is running. I'm in the process of trying
to review that system right now. I think we need a lot more of
these, all around the world. We do need research into
use limitation. I believe we're going to get
legislation on, basically, copy protection for digital
objects because of the 3D printers, because of bio
printers, because of software defined radio. And that's going to really
hurt our industry. Because lawmakers are not
going to get this right. They're going to do something
draconian, and it's going to be ugly. So the better we can solve the
actual problems, the less likely we are to be handed
solutions that won't work, and will hurt everything else. To vendors, I want people to
remember that a lot of the technologies we build have dual
use, that business and military uses are basically
the same. So you see Blue Coat used to
censor the Syrian internet, or Sophos used to eavesdrop on the
internet, or social media enabling surveillance. On the one hand, the FBI is
trying to get laws passed to have us put back doors in our
communication systems. On the other hand, we don't want
other countries to do the same thing. This is hard. The policy prescriptions,
I think, are harder. I think in the near term, we
need to keep circumvention legal, and keep net
neutrality. I think those two things give
us some backstop towards the powerful becoming even
more powerful. Long term, fundamentally, we
have to recognize we can't have it both ways, that if we
want privacy, we have to want it everywhere-- our country
and abroad. If we think that surveillance
is good, we have to accept it elsewhere. Fundamentally, I want to
see power levelled. Because the relationship
is real unbalanced. If you think about historical
feudalism, or you read about it, it eventually evolved into
a more balanced government relationship. So you had feudalism, which
started out as this bilateral agreement-- we're in a dangerous world. I need you to protect me. So I will pledge my allegiance
to you-- turned into something
very unbalanced-- I'm powerful. I can do whatever I want. I will ignore my agreements. You're powerless. You can't do anything. And that eventually changed with
the rise of the nation state, with, basically, rules
that gave the feudal lords responsibilities as well as
rights, culminating in something like the
Magna Carta. And I think we're going to need
something like that on the internet, with the current
set of powers on the internet, which will be both government
and corporate-- some basic understanding that
there are rights and responsibilities. There's some more balanced
relationship. And whether that's limitations
on what vendors can do with our data, or some public
scrutiny for the rules by which we are judged by
our data, I expect-- no time soon, but eventually--
these will come. Because I think this is
how we get liberty in your internet world. And I think this is actually
a very long and difficult battle. I think some of the results
will upend your company. But they might not be coming
for a decade or more. So that's what I
have prepared. I'm happy to take questions. [APPLAUSE] BRUCE SCHNEIER: So there are
some rules about a microphone that are confusing to me. AUDIENCE: You talked about a
game between governments, on one hand, and corporations, on
the other, using each other's power systems to essentially get
at everyone in the middle. How long do you think that
that game can play out? Is it indefinite? Can it continue for the
foreseeable future? Or do you see some sort of
turning point in which some scandal or something will so
threaten the middle as to galvanize them? BRUCE SCHNEIER: I don't know. And I think we're very much in
uncharted territory, here. We're living in a world where
it's very hard for the middle to be galvanize, for lots
of different reasons. A lot of people have
written about this. I have trouble predicting the
future, because things are changing so fast. Right now, it all seems quite
dysfunctional, and that there's no mechanism for
things to change. But of course, that's
ridiculous. That things will change. Exactly how, I don't know. And which way they'll change,
I don't know. If the world is the terrorists
might have nukes, and we're all going to die unless we live
under totalitarianism, people are going
to accept that. Because when people
are scared, that's what they'll accept. And technology is to the point
where that actually might be the world. But there are a lot of other
ways this can play. I think this is, vaguely, the
topic of my next book, so I hope to explore the different
avenues we might move out of this. I haven't even begun to have an
idea of which is likely to be correct. And I think I wouldn't trust
me when I've decided. Just read science fiction
20 years ago. We're really bad at predicting,
not technical future, but social future. Everyone could predict
the automobile-- that it would make people
drive faster. But no one predicted
the suburb. It's always the second
order social effects. And that's what this
is all about. So I just don't know. AUDIENCE: You mentioned the
convergence of power, convergence of objectives,
for the corporations and governments, and also, sort
of the convergence of capabilities, like the
Exxon Mobil comment. Do you see anything along the
lines of the distinction between them vanishing? Corporations as states BRUCE SCHNEIER: --I think they,
largely, are vanishing. And this is my main complaint
with libertarianism as a philosophy. In the mid 1700s, it was great,
because it identified the fact that power imbalance
is bad, and we need to equalize power. But it kind of got stuck there,
and didn't notice that power changed. I think there is a
lot of blurring. And some of it is the fact
that money controls government. And powerful corporations
have the money. We have seen blurring at other
times in history-- the Dutch East India
Company in Africa. There are different examples
where corporations were de facto governments in areas where
they were operating. This is not as stark. But power is changing. Power is less hard power. Power is more soft power,
to use Nye's term. That the nature of power
is changing, such-- so I do think there
is a blurring. But it's different than
we thought, when we worried about this. The nature of social control is
very, very different now, than it was. The nature of surveillance
is very different. And it's going to
change again. What is the half-life of
these technologies? 10 years? Five? So what's going to happen in
five to 10 years that will be completely different? I don't know. AUDIENCE: I really liked your
feudalism analogy, and I see one potential flaw in it. And I wanted your-- BRUCE SCHNEIER: Oh, good. Flaws are good. I love those. AUDIENCE: --thought about it. As I understand it, feudal
lords were pretty much monopolists. Like, the Russian serfs were
bound to the land, and so they didn't get a choice of which
Lord to be with. Whereas, people do, in fact,
have a choice when there's two or three big guys, right? BRUCE SCHNEIER: They
have a choice. But is it really a choice? If all three cellphone companies
are collecting the same data, and giving it to the
same government under the same rules, it's not
really a choice. AUDIENCE: But if I can get a lot
more customers by having a very clear privacy policy the
respects you in a way the other guy doesn't, then-- BRUCE SCHNEIER: It seems
not to be true. It seems you get more customers
by obfuscating your privacy policy. And there are a lot of great
psych experiments about this, that if you make privacy
salient by showing your privacy policy, people will
say, whoa, that's bad. Facebook is a great example. They make the privacy policy
really hard to find. Because they don't want
you think about it. Because if you don't think
about it, you share. So this is the problem
with mini-big. Your normal market economics,
which involves multiple sellers competing on features,
only works if you've got a lot of sellers competing
on features. If the three companies that
do the same thing-- I mean, what's the difference
between Apple and Microsoft in operating systems? Is it really that different
where privacy matters? Around the edges-- unless the
companies choose to compete on those features-- I can't fly less secure airlines
where we'd get you through air security quicker. There is no competition
in that. Or more secure airlines--
we do a background check on everybody. It's a perfectly reasonable
feature to compete on, but there isn't any competition. So especially if some of these
deal with government demands, you're just not going to
have the competition. And there's a lot a reason
to make that go away as much as possible. Because these companies want
people to share more. [INAUDIBLE] land
is interesting. No. Well, yes and no. It's very hard for someone
regular to leave Facebook. That's where your party
invites come from. That's where your friends are. That's where your social
interaction is. You don't go on Facebook, you
don't get invited to parties, you never get laid, you have
a really sucky college experience. So you're not bound. But there's a lot of social
push to stay. It's very hard to take your data
when you leave-- again, Google is an exception, here. Remember the whole battles
about cellphone number portability? That was all to bind people to
the cellphone companies, to raise the cost of switching. You raise the cost of switching,
you can do a lot more to your customers,
or users. If the customers can't
switch, you can piss them off a whole lot. So, yeah. And the other reason I kind of
like the serf model is the notion of people doing stuff
online, which is the raw material that companies
use to make profits. So it's kind of like you're
farming for your life. And I guess Farmville would be
perfect for this, right? But maybe that's too much. The other way that the metaphor
works-- and other people have written
about this-- the feudal metaphor-- is that, in a feudal system,
everything is owned. There's no commons. And we're seeing this on the
internet, that no piece of the internet is a commons. In the United States,
we have very particular rules about commons-- free speech rules, association
rules, rules about protesting-- because you're on a street. You're on a public street. And those rules don't apply in,
for example, Zuccotti Park in New York, because that
was a privately owned public space. The internet is, entirely,
privately owned public spaces. So Apple is well within its
rights to say, to an app creator who made an app to
show US drone strikes in Pakistan, you can't have
your app on my store. Because it is not a free
speech-- it is not a protest. This is a private space. Apple gets to decide. So this lack of a public sphere
in the world where we are all associating is another
way the feudal model works. I don't know how to fit it
in to what I'm doing. I'll probably figure it
out sooner or later. AUDIENCE: The feudal
model is really appealing at first blush. But another problem with it is
that we actually do live in a democracy, at least
theoretically. And we do have the power to
vote, at least theoretically. The problem seems, to me, not
that there are currently all kinds of tricks, like the
people who obfuscate the privacy policies win. It's more about the lassitude
of those who are being governed by the government
they set up, or the corporations they choose
to do business with. And so ultimately, the problem
is we aren't looking after our own interests. And so that seems to be what
needs to be fixed. And it's not feudalism,
because we have the opportunity to escape. We're just not taking advantage of it through tricks. BRUCE SCHNEIER: I
agree with that. It's just getting harder
and harder. And some of it is the fact that
we are just too good at psychological manipulation. Advertising, political speeches,
have gotten to good. I don't know how fair
the game is. Yes, you are fundamentally
right. The question is does
that translate to being right in practice. The United States is
particularly hard. Our political system is not
designed for a huge spectrum of political ideas. Go to any other countries and
you just realize how narrow our political debate is, just
because of the way our two party system is set up. But again, unless the parties
choose to compete on these features, we don't really
have a choice. And some features they do,
and some they don't. But yes, you are inherently
right. By the book, that's correct. The question is how does that
translate into to what we can actually do, realistically. AUDIENCE: So we need to
trick Facebook into becoming the EFF. BRUCE SCHNEIER: I'm game. AUDIENCE: Does that mean that
governments have an incentive to encourage there to be a few
small companies, so that then, they don't compete on
things like privacy? If there's only three, it's
much harder for them to compete on something
like that. BRUCE SCHNEIER: I don't know. There are a lot of examples
we could look at. We could start poking
at some of them. Automobile manufacturers-- they do compete on safety,
and have for many years. Saab built an industry on our
car is safer than your car. So you do see security
features, sometimes. In a lot of ways,
the organic food movement is a food safety-- MALE SPEAKER: Saab is gone. BRUCE SCHNEIER: Yeah, but
in the '70s, that was what they did. MALE SPEAKER: Organic
food was safe. BRUCE SCHNEIER: Yeah but,
organic food is believed to be more pure. It's a food purity sale, which
is inherently a health sale, and a safety sale. You can argue whether it's real
or fake, but it's how the companies are competing. I don't think the government
is incenting any particular economic outcome. I think there's just, right now,
a very happy confluence. Thank you very much. [APPLAUSE]
