Books and
Cooks West
November 2003
Beyond Fear by Bruce Schneier
Beyond Fear: Thinking Sensibly About Security in an Uncertain World
by Bruce Schneier
Kim's place
Saturday, November 29 at 5:30 PM
Shrimp and tofu stir-fry, salad, cranberry scones, brownies, white wine
Our rating: 4.25 cups of tea!
Many
of us, especially since 9/11, have become personally concerned about
issues of security, and this is no surprise. Security is near the top
of government and corporate agendas around the globe. Security-related
stories appear on the front page everyday. How well though, do any of
us truly understand what achieving real security involves?
In Beyond Fear, Bruce Schneier invites us to take a critical
look at not just the threats to our security, but the ways in which
we're encouraged to think about security by law enforcement agencies,
businesses of all shapes and sizes, and our national governments and
militaries. Schneier believes we all can and should be better security
consumers, and that the trade-offs we make in the name of security - in
terms of cash outlays, taxes, inconvenience, and diminished freedoms -
should be part of an ongoing negotiation in our personal, professional,
and civic lives, and the subject of an open and informed national
discussion.
With a well-deserved reputation for original and sometimes
iconoclastic thought, Schneier has a lot to say that is provocative,
counter-intuitive, and just plain good sense. He explains in detail,
for example, why we need to design security systems that don't just
work well, but fail well, and why secrecy on the part of government
often undermines security. He also believes, for instance, that
national ID cards are an exceptionally bad idea: technically unsound,
and even destructive of security. And, contrary to a lot of current
nay-sayers, he thinks online shopping is fundamentally safe, and that
many of the new airline security measure (though by no means all) are
actually quite effective. A skeptic of much that's promised by highly
touted technologies like biometrics, Schneier is also a refreshingly
positive, problem-solving force in the often self-dramatizing and
fear-mongering world of security pundits.
Schneier helps the reader to understand the issues at stake,
and how to best come to one's own conclusions, including the vast
infrastructure we already have in place, and the vaster systems--some
useful, others useless or worse--that we're being asked to submit to
and pay for.
