Tag Archives: Schneier news

More on Rewiring Democracy

Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2025/11/71226.html

It’s been a month since Rewiring Democracy: How AI Will Transform Our Politics, Government, and Citizenship was published. From what we know, sales are good.

Some of the book’s forty-three chapters are available online: chapters 2, 12, 28, 34, 38, and 41.

We need more reviews—six on Amazon is not enough, and no one has yet posted a viral TikTok review. One review was published in Nature and another on the RSA Conference website, but more would be better. If you’ve read the book, please leave a review somewhere.

My coauthor and I have been doing all sort of book events, both online and in person. This book event, with Danielle Allen at the Harvard Kennedy School Ash Center, is particularly good. We also have been doing a ton of podcasts, both separately and together. They’re all on the book’s homepage.

There are two live book events in December. If you’re in Boston, come see us at the MIT Museum on 12/1. If you’re in Toronto, you can see me at the Munk School at the University of Toronto on 12/2.

I’m also doing a live AMA on the book on the RSA Conference website on 12/16. Register here.

Upcoming Speaking Engagements

Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2025/11/upcoming-speaking-engagements-50.html

This is a current list of where and when I am scheduled to speak:

  • My coauthor Nathan E. Sanders and I are speaking at the Rayburn House Office Building in Washington, DC at noon ET on November 17, 2025. The event is hosted by the POPVOX Foundation and the topic is “AI and Congress: Practical Steps to Govern and Prepare.”
  • I’m speaking on “Integrity and Trustworthy AI” at North Hennepin Community College in Brooklyn Park, Minnesota, USA, on Friday, November 21, 2025, at 2:00 PM CT. The event is cohosted by the college and The Twin Cities IEEE Computer Society.
  • Nathan E. Sanders and I will be speaking at the MIT Museum in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA, on December 1, 2025, at 6:00 pm ET.
  • Nathan E. Sanders and I will be speaking at a virtual event hosted by City Lights on the Zoom platform, on December 3, 2025, at 6:00 PM PT.
  • I’m speaking and signing books at the Chicago Public Library in Chicago, Illinois, USA, on February 5, 2026. Details to come.

The list is maintained on this page.

Upcoming Speaking Engagements

Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2025/10/upcoming-speaking-engagements-49.html

This is a current list of where and when I am scheduled to speak:

  • Nathan E. Sanders and I will be giving a book talk on Rewiring Democracy at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Ash Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA, on October 22, 2025, at noon ET.
  • Nathan E. Sanders and I will be speaking and signing books at the Cambridge Public Library in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA, on October 22, 2025, at 6:00 PM ET. The event is sponsored by Harvard Bookstore.
  • Nathan E. Sanders and I will give a virtual talk about our book Rewiring Democracy on October 23, 2025, at 1:00 PM ET. The event is hosted by Data & Society.
  • I’m speaking at the Ted Rogers School of Management in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, on Thursday, October 29, 2025, at 1:00 PM ET.
  • Nathan E. Sanders and I will give a virtual talk about our book Rewiring Democracy on November 3, 2025, at 2:00 PM ET. The event is hosted by the Boston Public Library.
  • 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.
  • Nathan E. Sanders and I will be speaking at the MIT Museum in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA, on December 1, 2025, at 6:00 pm ET.
  • Nathan E. Sanders and I will be speaking at a virtual event hosted by City Lights on the Zoom platform, on December 3, 2025, at 6:00 PM PT.
  • I’m speaking and signing books at the Chicago Public Library in Chicago, Illinois, USA, on February 5, 2026. Details to come.

The list is maintained on this page.

Rewiring Democracy is Coming Soon

Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2025/10/rewiring-democracy-is-coming-soon.html

My latest book, Rewiring Democracy: How AI Will Transform Our Politics, Government, and Citizenship, will be published in just over a week. No reviews yet, but you can read chapters 12 and 34 (of 43 chapters total).

You can order the book pretty much everywhere, and a copy signed by me here.

Please help spread the word. I want this book to make a splash when it’s public. Leave a review on whatever site you buy it from. Or make a TikTok video. Or do whatever you kids do these days. Is anyone a Slashdot contributor? I’d like the book to be announced there.

Upcoming Speaking Engagements

Post Syndicated from B. Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2025/09/upcoming-speaking-engagements-48.html

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.
  • I’m speaking with Crystal Lee at the MIT Museum in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA, on December 1, 2025. Details to come.
  • I’m speaking and signing books at the Chicago Public Library in Chicago, Illinois, USA, on February 5, 2026. Details to come.

The list is maintained on this page.

My Latest Book: Rewiring Democracy

Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2025/09/my-latest-book-rewiring-democracy.html

I am pleased to announce the imminent publication of my latest book, Rewiring Democracy: How AI will Transform our Politics, Government, and Citizenship: coauthored with Nathan Sanders, and published by MIT Press on October 21.

Rewiring Democracy looks beyond common tropes like deepfakes to examine how AI technologies will affect democracy in five broad areas: politics, legislating, administration, the judiciary, and citizenship. There is a lot to unpack here, both positive and negative. We do talk about AI’s possible role in both democratic backsliding or restoring democracies, but the fundamental focus of the book is on present and future uses of AIs within functioning democracies. (And there is a lot going on, in both national and local governments around the world.) And, yes, we talk about AI-driven propaganda and artificial conversation.

Some of what we write about is happening now, but much of what we write about is speculation. In general, we take an optimistic view of AI’s capabilities. Not necessarily because we buy all the hype, but because a little optimism is necessary to discuss possible societal changes due to the technologies—and what’s really interesting are the second-order effects of the technologies. Unless you can imagine an array of possible futures, you won’t be able to steer towards the futures you want. We end on the need for public AI: AI systems that are not created by for-profit corporations for their own short-term benefit.

Honestly, this was a challenging book to write through the US presidential campaign of 2024, and then the first few months of the second Trump administration. I think we did a good job of acknowledging the realities of what is happening in the US without unduly focusing on it.

Here’s my webpage for the book, where you can read the publisher’s summary, see the table of contents, read some blurbs from early readers, and order copies from your favorite online bookstore—or signed copies directly from me. Note that I am spending the current academic year at the Munk School at the University of Toronto. I will be able to mail signed books right after publication on October 22, and then on November 25.

Please help me spread the word. I would like the book to make something of a splash when it’s first published.

EDITED TO ADD (9/8): You can order a signed copy here.

I’m Spending the Year at the Munk School

Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2025/08/im-spending-the-year-at-the-munk-school.html

This academic year, I am taking a sabbatical from the Kennedy School and Harvard University. (It’s not a real sabbatical—I’m just an adjunct—but it’s the same idea.) I will be spending the Fall 2025 and Spring 2026 semesters at the Munk School at the University of Toronto.

I will be organizing a reading group on AI security in the fall. I will be teaching my cybersecurity policy class in the Spring. I will be working with Citizen Lab, the Law School, and the Schwartz Reisman Institute. And I will be enjoying all the multicultural offerings of Toronto.

It’s all pretty exciting.

Hearing on the Federal Government and AI

Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2025/06/hearing-on-the-federal-government-and-ai.html

On Thursday I testified before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform at a hearing titled “The Federal Government in the Age of Artificial Intelligence.”

The other speakers mostly talked about how cool AI was—and sometimes about how cool their own company was—but I was asked by the Democrats to specifically talk about DOGE and the risks of exfiltrating our data from government agencies and feeding it into AIs.

My written testimony is here. Video of the hearing is here.

Privacy for Agentic AI

Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2025/05/privacy-for-agentic-ai.html

Sooner or later, it’s going to happen. AI systems will start acting as agents, doing things on our behalf with some degree of autonomy. I think it’s worth thinking about the security of that now, while its still a nascent idea.

In 2019, I joined Inrupt, a company that is commercializing Tim Berners-Lee’s open protocol for distributed data ownership. We are working on a digital wallet that can make use of AI in this way. (We used to call it an “active wallet.” Now we’re calling it an “agentic wallet.”)

I talked about this a bit at the RSA Conference earlier this week, in my keynote talk about AI and trust. Any useful AI assistant is going to require a level of access—and therefore trust—that rivals what we currently our email provider, social network, or smartphone.

This Active Wallet is an example of an AI assistant. It’ll combine personal information about you, transactional data that you are a party to, and general information about the world. And use that to answer questions, make predictions, and ultimately act on your behalf. We have demos of this running right now. At least in its early stages. Making it work is going require an extraordinary amount of trust in the system. This requires integrity. Which is why we’re building protections in from the beginning.

Visa is also thinking about this. It just announced a protocol that uses AI to help people make purchasing decisions.

I like Visa’s approach because it’s an AI-agnostic standard. I worry a lot about lock-in and monopolization of this space, so anything that lets people easily switch between AI models is good. And I like that Visa is working with Inrupt so that the data is decentralized as well. Here’s our announcement about its announcement:

This isn’t a new relationship—we’ve been working together for over two years. We’ve conducted a successful POC and now we’re standing up a sandbox inside Visa so merchants, financial institutions and LLM providers can test our Agentic Wallets alongside the rest of Visa’s suite of Intelligent Commerce APIs.

For that matter, we welcome any other company that wants to engage in the world of personal, consented Agentic Commerce to come work with us as well.

I joined Inrupt years ago because I thought that Solid could do for personal data what HTML did for published information. I liked that the protocol was an open standard, and that it distributed data instead of centralizing it. AI agents need decentralized data. “Wallet” is a good metaphor for personal data stores. I’m hoping this is another step towards adoption.

Upcoming Speaking Engagements

Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2025/03/upcoming-speaking-engagements-44.html

This is a current list of where and when I am scheduled to speak:

The list is maintained on this page.

Upcoming Speaking Engagements

Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2025/02/upcoming-speaking-engagements-43.html

This is a current list of where and when I am scheduled to speak:

  • I’m speaking at Boskone 62 in Boston, Massachusetts, USA, which runs from February 14-16, 2025. My talk is at 4:00 PM ET on the 15th.
  • I’m speaking at the Rossfest Symposium in Cambridge, UK, on March 25, 2025.

The list is maintained on this page.

Upcoming Speaking Engagements

Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2025/01/upcoming-speaking-engagements-42.html

This is a current list of where and when I am scheduled to speak:

  • I’m speaking on “AI: Trust & Power” at Capricon 45 in Chicago, Illinois, USA, at 11:30 AM on February 7, 2025. I’m also signing books there on Saturday, February 8, starting at 1:45 PM.
  • I’m speaking at Boskone 62 in Boston, Massachusetts, USA, which runs from February 14-16, 2025.
  • I’m speaking at the Rossfest Symposium in Cambridge, UK, on March 25, 2025.

The list is maintained on this page.

More on My AI and Democracy Book

Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2024/10/more-on-my-ai-and-democracy-book.html

In July, I wrote about my new book project on AI and democracy, to be published by MIT Press in fall 2025. My co-author and collaborator Nathan Sanders and I are hard at work writing.

At this point, we would like feedback on titles. Here are four possibilities:

  1. Rewiring the Republic: How AI Will Transform our Politics, Government, and Citizenship
  2. The Thinking State: How AI Can Improve Democracy
  3. Better Run: How AI Can Make our Politics, Government, Citizenship More Efficient, Effective and Fair
  4. AI and the New Future of Democracy: Changes in Politics, Government, and Citizenship

What we want out of the title is that it convey (1) that it is a book about AI, (2) that it is a book about democracy writ large (and not just deepfakes), and (3) that it is largely optimistic.

What do you like? Feel free to do some mixing and matching: swapping “Will Transform” for “Will Improve” for “Can Transform” for “Can Improve,” for example. Or “Democracy” for “the Republic.” Remember, the goal here is for a title that will make a potential reader pick the book up off a shelf, or read the blurb text on a webpage. It needs to be something that will catch the reader’s attention. (Other title ideas are here).

Also, FYI, this is the current table of contents:

Introduction
1. Introduction: How AI will Change Democracy
2. Core AI Capabilities
3. Democracy as an Information System

Part I: AI-Assisted Politics
4. Background: Making Mistakes
5. Talking to Voters
6. Conducting Polls
7. Organizing a Political Campaign
8. Fundraising for Politics
9. Being a Politician

Part II: AI-Assisted Legislators
10. Background: Explaining Itself
11. Background: Who’s to Blame?
12. Listening to Constituents
13. Writing Laws
14. Writing More Complex Laws
15. Writing Laws that Empower Machines
16. Negotiating Legislation

Part III: The AI-Assisted Administration
17. Background: Exhibiting Values and Bias
18. Background: Augmenting Versus Replacing People
19. Serving People
20. Operating Government
21. Enforcing Regulations

Part IV: The AI-Assisted Court
22. Background: Being Fair
23. Background: Getting Hacked
24. Acting as a Lawyer
25. Arbitrating Disputes
26. Enforcing the Law
27. Reshaping Legislative Intent
28. Being a Judge

Part V: AI-Assisted Citizens
29. Background: AI and Power
30. Background: AI and Trust
31. Explaining the News
32. Watching the Government
33. Moderating, Facilitating, and Building Consensus
34. Acting as Your Personal Advocate
35. Acting as Your Personal Political Proxy

Part VI: Ensuring That AI Benefits Democracy
36. Why AI is Not Yet Good for Democracy
37. How to Ensure AI is Good for Democracy
38. What We Need to Do Now
39. Conclusion

Everything is subject to change, of course. The manuscript isn’t due to the publisher until the end of March, and who knows what AI developments will happen between now and then.

EDITED: The title under consideration is “Rewiring the Republic,” and not “Rewiring Democracy.” Although, I suppose, both are really under consideration.

Upcoming Speaking Engagements

Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2024/09/upcoming-speaking-engagements-40.html

This is a current list of where and when I am scheduled to speak:

  • I’m speaking at eCrime 2024 in Boston, Massachusetts, USA. The event runs from September 24 through 26, 2024, and my keynote is at 8:45 AM ET on the 24th.
  • I’m briefly speaking at the EPIC Champion of Freedom Awards in Washington, DC on September 25, 2024.
  • I’m speaking at SOSS Fusion 2024 in Atlanta, Georgia, USA. The event will be held on October 22 and 23, 2024, and my talk is  at 9:15 AM ET on October 22, 2024.

The list is maintained on this page.