Schneier on Security

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Data and Goliath

The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World

A Book by Bruce Schneier

A New York Times Best Seller

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.

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Praise for Data and Goliath

“A thought-provoking, absorbing, and comprehensive guide to our new big data world.”

—Gil Press, Forbes

“Schneier 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

“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, author of David and Goliath

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

—Richard A. Clarke, former chief counterterrorism adviser on the National Security Council under Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, and author of Cyber War

“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 who are seeking to strip privacy from all of us.”

—Seymour M. Hersh, Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist

“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, author of Reamde

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

—Steven Pinker, Johnstone Professor of Psychology, Harvard University, and author of The Better Angels of Our Nature

“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, editor-in-chief of Backchannel and author of Crypto and Hackers

“A noted security researcher and author of many books on cryptography and digital security, Schneier's been on this beat a long time, and Data and Goliath is a lucid, sophisticated overview of how corporate and governmental surveillance works, how it doesn't, and what we can do about it. His book is finely constructed, free of cant, and practical in its conclusions—marks of an engineer. As one of a limited number of experts given access to the Edward Snowden documents, he is also in a special position to explain complicated, highly secret surveillance programs to the American public.”

—Jacob Silverman, LA Times

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Photo of Bruce Schneier by Per Ervland.

Schneier on Security is a personal website. Opinions expressed are not necessarily those of IBM Resilient.