B. Schneier – Noise https://noise.getoto.net The collective thoughts of the interwebz Tue, 16 Sep 2025 05:08:09 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.8.2 Upcoming Speaking Engagements https://noise.getoto.net/2025/09/14/upcoming-speaking-engagements-43/ Sun, 14 Sep 2025 16:02:45 +0000 https://www.schneier.com/?p=70755 This is a current list of where and when I am scheduled to speak:

  • I’m speaking and signing books at the Cambridge Public Library on October 22, 2025 at 6 PM ET. The event is sponsored by Harvard Bookstore.
  • I’m giving a virtual talk about my book Rewiring Democracy at 1 PM ET on October 23, 2025. The event is hosted by Data & Society. More details to come.
  • I’m speaking at the World Forum for Democracy in Strasbourg, France, November 5-7, 2025.
  • I’m speaking and signing books at the University of Toronto Bookstore in Toronto, Ontario, Canada on November 14, 2025. Details to come...
]]> Upcoming Speaking Engagements https://noise.getoto.net/2025/04/14/upcoming-speaking-engagements-40/ Mon, 14 Apr 2025 16:04:48 +0000 https://www.schneier.com/?p=70115 Reimagining Democracy https://noise.getoto.net/2025/04/11/reimagining-democracy-2/ Fri, 11 Apr 2025 00:35:00 +0000 https://www.schneier.com/?p=70105 Imagine that all of us—all of society—have landed on some alien planet and need to form a government: clean slate. We do not have any legacy systems from the United States or any other country. We do not have any special or unique interests to perturb our thinking. How would we govern ourselves? It is unlikely that we would use the systems we have today. Modern representative democracy was the best form of government that eighteenth-century technology could invent. The twenty-first century is very different: scientifically, technically, and philosophically. For example, eighteenth-century democracy was designed under the assumption that travel and communications were both hard...

]]> Upcoming Speaking Events https://noise.getoto.net/2024/12/14/upcoming-speaking-events-2/ Sat, 14 Dec 2024 17:01:50 +0000 https://www.schneier.com/?p=69686 AI and the 2024 Elections https://noise.getoto.net/2024/12/04/ai-and-the-2024-elections/ Wed, 04 Dec 2024 12:09:23 +0000 https://www.schneier.com/?p=69647 It’s been the biggest year for elections in human history: 2024 is a “super-cycle” year in which 3.7 billion eligible voters in 72 countries had the chance to go the polls. These are also the first AI elections, where many feared that deepfakes and artificial intelligence-generated misinformation would overwhelm the democratic processes. As 2024 draws to a close, it’s instructive to take stock of how democracy did.

In a Pew survey of Americans from earlier this fall, nearly eight times as many respondents expected AI to be used for mostly bad purposes...

]]> AI and the SEC Whistleblower Program https://noise.getoto.net/2024/10/21/ai-and-the-sec-whistleblower-program/ Mon, 21 Oct 2024 11:09:33 +0000 https://www.schneier.com/?p=69512 Tax farming is the practice of licensing tax collection to private contractors. Used heavily in ancient Rome, it’s largely fallen out of practice because of the obvious conflict of interest between the state and the contractor. Because tax farmers are primarily interested in short-term revenue, they have no problem abusing taxpayers and making things worse for them in the long term. Today, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is engaged in a modern-day version of tax farming. And the potential for abuse will grow when the farmers start using artificial intelligence...

]]> Upcoming Speaking Engagements https://noise.getoto.net/2024/10/14/upcoming-speaking-engagements-36/ Mon, 14 Oct 2024 16:49:08 +0000 https://www.schneier.com/?p=69488 LLMs’ Data-Control Path Insecurity https://noise.getoto.net/2024/05/13/llms-data-control-path-insecurity/ Mon, 13 May 2024 11:04:08 +0000 https://www.schneier.com/?p=68882 Back in the 1960s, if you played a 2,600Hz tone into an AT&T pay phone, you could make calls without paying. A phone hacker named John Draper noticed that the plastic whistle that came free in a box of Captain Crunch cereal worked to make the right sound. That became his hacker name, and everyone who knew the trick made free pay-phone calls.

There were all sorts of related hacks, such as faking the tones that signaled coins dropping into a pay phone and faking tones used by repair equipment. AT&T could sometimes change the signaling tones, make them more complicated, or try to keep them secret. But the general class of exploit was impossible to fix because the problem was general: Data and control used the same channel. That is, the commands that told the phone switch what to do were sent along the same path as voices...

]]> Smuggling Gold by Disguising it as Machine Parts https://noise.getoto.net/2024/04/12/smuggling-gold-by-disguising-it-as-machine-parts/ Fri, 12 Apr 2024 11:01:18 +0000 https://www.schneier.com/?p=68776 AI and Trust https://noise.getoto.net/2024/03/26/ai-and-trust-2/ Tue, 26 Mar 2024 09:01:57 +0000 https://www.schneier.com/?p=68672 How the “Frontier” Became the Slogan of Uncontrolled AI https://noise.getoto.net/2024/02/29/how-the-frontier-became-the-slogan-of-uncontrolled-ai/ Thu, 29 Feb 2024 12:00:19 +0000 https://www.schneier.com/?p=68549 Artificial intelligence (AI) has been billed as the next frontier of humanity: the newly available expanse whose exploration will drive the next era of growth, wealth, and human flourishing. It’s a scary metaphor. Throughout American history, the drive for expansion and the very concept of terrain up for grabs—land grabs, gold rushes, new frontiers—have provided a permission structure for imperialism and exploitation. This could easily hold true for AI.

This isn’t the first time the concept of a frontier has been used as a metaphor for AI, or technology in general. As early as 2018, the powerful foundation models powering cutting-edge applications like chatbots ...

]]> Upcoming Speaking Engagements https://noise.getoto.net/2024/02/14/upcoming-speaking-engagements-10/ Wed, 14 Feb 2024 17:01:13 +0000 https://www.schneier.com/?p=68422 This is a current list of where and when I am scheduled to speak:

  • I’m speaking at the Munich Security Conference (MSC) 2024 in Munich, Germany, on Friday, February 16, 2024.
  • I’m giving a keynote on “AI and Trust” at Generative AI, Free Speech, & Public Discourse. The symposium will be held at Columbia University in New York City and online, at 3 PM ET on Tuesday, February 20, 2024.
  • I’m speaking (remotely) on “AI, Trust and Democracy” at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana, USA, at noon ET on February 20, 2024. The talk is part of the 2023-2024 Beyond the Web Speaker Series, presented by The Ostrom Workshop and Hamilton Lugar School...
]]> Upcoming Speaking Engagements https://noise.getoto.net/2024/01/14/upcoming-speaking-engagements-9/ Sun, 14 Jan 2024 17:01:46 +0000 https://www.schneier.com/?p=68303 AI and Lossy Bottlenecks https://noise.getoto.net/2023/12/28/ai-and-lossy-bottlenecks/ Thu, 28 Dec 2023 12:01:24 +0000 https://www.schneier.com/?p=68241 Artificial intelligence is poised to upend much of society, removing human limitations inherent in many systems. One such limitation is information and logistical bottlenecks in decision-making.

Traditionally, people have been forced to reduce complex choices to a small handful of options that don’t do justice to their true desires. Artificial intelligence has the potential to remove that limitation. And it has the potential to drastically change how democracy functions.

AI researcher Tantum Collins and I, a public-interest technology scholar...

]]> AI and Trust https://noise.getoto.net/2023/12/04/ai-and-trust/ Mon, 04 Dec 2023 12:05:33 +0000 https://www.schneier.com/?p=68156 I trusted a lot today. I trusted my phone to wake me on time. I trusted Uber to arrange a taxi for me, and the driver to get me to the airport safely. I trusted thousands of other drivers on the road not to ram my car on the way. At the airport, I trusted ticket agents and maintenance engineers and everyone else who keeps airlines operating. And the pilot of the plane I flew in. And thousands of other people at the airport and on the plane, any of which could have attacked me. And all the people that prepared and served my breakfast, and the entire food supply chain—any of them could have poisoned me. When I landed here, I trusted thousands more people: at the airport, on the road, in this building, in this room. And that was all before 10:30 this morning...

]]> Decoupling for Security https://noise.getoto.net/2023/11/08/decoupling-for-security/ Wed, 08 Nov 2023 12:08:09 +0000 https://www.schneier.com/?p=68058 This is an excerpt from a longer paper. You can read the whole thing (complete with sidebars and illustrations) here.

Our message is simple: it is possible to get the best of both worlds. We can and should get the benefits of the cloud while taking security back into our own hands. Here we outline a strategy for doing that.

What Is Decoupling?

In the last few years, a slew of ideas old and new have converged to reveal a path out of this morass, but they haven’t been widely recognized, combined, or used. These ideas, which we’ll refer to in the aggregate as “decoupling,” allow us to rethink both security and privacy...

]]> Spaf on the Morris Worm https://noise.getoto.net/2023/11/07/spaf-on-the-morris-worm/ Tue, 07 Nov 2023 12:08:37 +0000 https://www.schneier.com/?p=68046