Data and Goliath Quotes

“The bargain you make, again and again, with various companies is surveillance in exchange for free service.”
― Bruce Schneier, Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World

“Two of the NSA’s internal databases, code-named HAPPYFOOT and FASCIA, contain comprehensive location information of devices worldwide. The NSA uses the databases to track people’s movements, identify people who associate with people of interest, and target drone strikes.”
― Bruce Schneier, Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World

“The UK company Cobham sells a system that allows someone to send a “blind” call to a phone—one that doesn’t ring, and isn’t detectable. The blind call forces the phone to transmit on a certain frequency, allowing the sender to track that phone to within one meter.”
― Bruce Schneier, Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World

“We saw this in late 2014 when Apple finally encrypted iPhone data; one after the other, law enforcement officials raised the specter of kidnappers and child predators. This is a common fearmongering assertion, but no one has pointed to any actual cases where this was an issue. Of the 3,576 major offenses for which warrants were granted for communications interception in 2013, exactly one involved kidnapping—and the victim wasn’t a child.”
― Bruce Schneier, Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World

“Or we fear terrorists more than the police, even though in the US you’re nine times more likely to be killed by a police officer than by a terrorist.”
― Bruce Schneier, Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World

“be killed by a police officer than by a terrorist.”
― Bruce Schneier, Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World

“Or we fear terrorists more than the police, even though in the US you’re nine times more likely to”
― Bruce Schneier, Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World

“The most insidious RATs can turn your computer’s camera on without turning the indicator light on. Not all ratters extort their victims; some just trade photos, videos, and files with each other.”
― Bruce Schneier, Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World

“And before any of that can happen, there must be some major changes in the way society views and values privacy, security, liberty, trust, and a handful of other abstract concepts that are defining this”
― Bruce Schneier, Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World

“But when it comes to governments, unhappy as I am to say it, I would rather be eavesdropped on by the US government than by many other regimes.”
― Bruce Schneier, Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World

“I started this book by talking about data as exhaust: something we all produce as we go about our information-age business. I think I can take that analogy one step further. Data is the pollution problem of the information age, and protecting privacy is the environmental challenge. Almost all computers produce personal information. It stays around, festering. How we deal with it—how we contain it and how we dispose of it—is central to the health of our information economy. Just as we look back today at the early decades of the industrial age and wonder how our ancestors could have ignored pollution in their rush to build an industrial world, our grandchildren will look back at us during these early decades of the information age and judge us on how we addressed the challenge of data collection and misuse. We should try to make them proud.”
― Bruce Schneier, Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World

“Writer and Internet activist Clay Shirky has noted that “institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution.”
― Bruce Schneier, Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World

“former NSA director Michael Hayden: “Give me the box you will allow me to operate in. I’m going to play to the very edges of that box. . . . You, the American people, through your elected representatives, give me the field of play and I will play very aggressively in it.”
― Bruce Schneier, Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World

“Workforces are flexible, jobs are outsourced, and people are expendable. Moving from employer to employer is now the norm. This means that secrets are shared with more people, and those people care less about them. Recall that five million people in the US have a security clearance, and that a majority of them are contractors rather than government employees.”
― Bruce Schneier, Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World

“Given current laws, trust is our only option.”
― Bruce Schneier, Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World

“Here is what’s true. Today’s technology gives governments and corporations robust capabilities for mass surveillance. Mass surveillance is dangerous. It enables discrimination based on almost any criteria: race, religion, class, political beliefs. It is being used to control what we see, what we can do, and, ultimately, what we say. It is being done without offering citizens recourse or any real ability to opt out, and without any meaningful checks and balances. It makes us less safe. It makes us less free. The rules we had established to protect us from these dangers under earlier technological regimes are now woefully insufficient; they are not working. We need to fix that, and we need to do it very soon.”
― Bruce Schneier, Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World

“The overwhelming bulk of surveillance is corporate, and it occurs because we ostensibly agree to it. I don’t mean that we make an informed decision agreeing to it; instead, we accept it either because we get value from the service or because we are offered a package deal that includes surveillance and don’t have any real choice in the matter.”
― Bruce Schneier, Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World

“NSA analyst touches something in the database,”
― Bruce Schneier, Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World

“The word “collect” has a very special definition, according to the Department of Defense. It doesn’t mean collect; it means that a person looks at, or analyzes, the data. In 2013, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper likened the NSA’s trove of accumulated data to a library. All those books are stored on the shelves, but very few are actually read. “So the task for us in the interest of preserving security and preserving civil liberties and privacy is to be as precise as we possibly can be when we go in that library and look for the books that we need to open up and actually read.” Think of that friend of yours who has thousands of books in his house. According to this ridiculous definition, the only books he can claim to have collected are the ones he’s read. This is why Clapper asserts he didn’t lie in a Senate hearing when he replied “no” to the question “Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?” From the military’s perspective, it’s not surveillance until a human being looks at the data, even if algorithms developed and implemented by defense personnel or contractors have analyzed it many times over.”
― Bruce Schneier, Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World

“Biologist Peter Watts makes the point that a desire for privacy is innate: mammals in particular don’t respond well to surveillance. We consider it a physical threat, because animals in the natural world are surveilled by predators. Surveillance makes us feel like prey, just as it makes the surveillors act like predators. Psychologists, sociologists, philosophers, novelists, and technologists have all written about the effects of constant surveillance, or even just the perception of constant surveillance. Studies show that we are less healthy, both physically and emotionally. We have feelings of low self-esteem, depression, and anxiety. Surveillance strips us of our dignity. It threatens our very selves as individuals. It’s a dehumanizing tactic employed in prisons and detention camps around the world.”
― Bruce Schneier, Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World

“The potential for manipulation here is enormous. Here’s one example. During the 2012 election, Facebook users had the opportunity to post an “I Voted” icon, much like the real stickers many of us get at polling places after voting. There is a documented bandwagon effect with respect to voting; you are more likely to vote if you believe your friends are voting, too. This manipulation had the effect of increasing voter turnout 0.4% nationwide. So far, so good. But now imagine if Facebook manipulated the visibility of the “I Voted” icon on the basis of either party affiliation or some decent proxy of it: ZIP code of residence, blogs linked to, URLs liked, and so on. It didn’t, but if it had, it would have had the effect of increasing voter turnout in one direction. It would be hard to detect, and it wouldn’t even be illegal. Facebook could easily tilt a close election by selectively manipulating what posts its users see. Google might do something similar with its search results.”
― Bruce Schneier, Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World

“Any time we’re monitored and profiled, there’s the potential for getting it wrong. You are already familiar with this; just think of all the irrelevant advertisements you’ve been shown on the Internet, on the basis of some algorithm misinterpreting your interests. For some people, that’s okay; for others, there’s low-level psychological harm from being categorized, whether correctly or incorrectly. The opportunity for harm rises as the judging becomes more important: our credit ratings depend on algorithms; how we’re treated at airport security depends partly on corporate-collected data. There are chilling effects as well.”
― Bruce Schneier, Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World

“Surveillance is the business model of the Internet for two primary reasons: people like free, and people like convenient.”
― Bruce Schneier, Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World

“Data is the exhaust of the information age.”
― Bruce Schneier, Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World

“The only reason we know this story is that Levison ran his own company. He had no corporate masters. He had no shareholders. He was able to destroy his own business for moral reasons.”
― Bruce Schneier, Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World

“Back in the early 1990s, the FBI started worrying about its ability to conduct telephone surveillance. The FBI could do it with the old analog phone switches: a laborious process involving alligator clips, wires, and a tape recorder. The problem was that digital switches didn’t work that way. Isolating individual connections was harder, and the FBI became concerned about the potential loss of its ability to wiretap. So it lobbied Congress hard and got a law passed in 1994 called the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act, or CALEA, requiring telcos to re-engineer their digital switches to have eavesdropping capabilities built in. Fast-forward 20 years, and the FBI again wants the IT industry to make surveillance easier for itself. A lot of communications no longer happen over the telephone. They’re happening over chat. They’re happening over e-mail. They’re happening over Skype. The FBI is currently lobbying for a legislative upgrade to CALEA, one that covers all communications systems: all voice, video, and text systems, including World of Warcraft and that little chat window attached to your online Scrabble game. The FBI’s ultimate goal is government prohibition of truly secure communications. Valerie”
― Bruce Schneier, Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World

“Many countries have a long history of spying on foreign corporations for their own military and commercial advantage. The US claims that it does not engage in commercial espionage, meaning that it does not hack foreign corporate networks and pass that information on to US competitors for commercial advantage. But it does engage in economic espionage, by hacking into foreign corporate networks and using that information in government trade negotiations that directly benefit US corporate interests. Recent examples are the Brazilian oil company Petrobras and the European SWIFT international bank payment system. In fact, a 1996 government report boasted that the NSA claimed that the economic benefits of one of its programs to US industry “totaled tens of billions of dollars over the last several years.” You may or may not see a substantive difference between the two types of espionage. China, without so clean a separation between its government and its industries, does not.”
― Bruce Schneier, Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World

“In 2014, a senior executive from the Ford Motor Company told an audience at the Consumer Electronics Show, “We know everyone who breaks the law, we know when you’re doing it. We have GPS in your car, so we know what you’re doing.” This came as a shock and surprise, since no one knew Ford had its car owners under constant surveillance. The company quickly retracted the remarks, but the comments left a lot of wiggle room for Ford to collect data on its car owners. We know from a Government Accountability Office report that both automobile companies and navigational aid companies collect a lot of location data from their users.”
― Bruce Schneier, Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World

“anonymity is valuable for all the reasons I’ve discussed in this chapter. It protects privacy, it empowers individuals, and it’s fundamental to liberty.”
― Bruce Schneier, Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World

“We are social animals, and there’s nothing more powerful or rewarding than communicating with other people. Digital means have become the easiest and quickest way to communicate.”
― Bruce Schneier, Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World