“Security Is Always a Choice Between Different Sets of Risk”

Politico
profiles Bruce Schneier, a security specialist who has emerged
as one of the foremost critics of the security state. Here’s an
excerpt:

After 9/11, Schneier saw a
familiar utopian thinking creeping into the politics of national
security, and he grew into an outspoken critic. He coined the term
“security theater” to describe the showy-but-ineffectual
performance of security around air travel, a choreography designed
to produce a feeling of safety despite being poorly implemented,
defending against the wrong danger, or both. His blog, dedicated to
cryptography and tech security, was for a time a catalog of the
many ways that ever-changing TSA regulations had been defeated by
people with everyday resources but above-average creativity. And
last year, he caused a small controversy when he cited research
claiming that in the years following the September 11th attacks,
enough people had chosen long-distance driving over air travel that
the increase in auto-accident fatalities surpassed the number of
deaths in the Twin Towers.

For Schneier, security is always a choice between different sets of
risk, and there is no such thing as a perfect defense; you
calculate the probabilities, and the potential costs of your
decisions, as best you can. His arguments illuminate not only the
places where politics and superstition have worked their way into
supposedly rational systems, but also, in sometimes unexpected
ways, how the shadow of 9/11 continues to define U.S. national
security.

Read the rest
here. Read Reason‘s interview with Schneier here,
and read a piece he wrote for us here.