Bruce Schneier

Security Technologist & Guru
  • Dubbed a "security guru" by The Economist and labeled "one of the world's most foremost security experts by Wired
  • Author of over a dozen books exploring the opportunities and problems of data, security, and cryptography
  • Captivates audiences with his candor and know-how, sharing strategies to enjoy the benefits of technology without falling prey to its insecurity

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When people want to understand the vulnerabilities of our increasingly digital world, and how to protect their privacy within it, they turn to Bruce Schneier. Dubbed a “security guru” by The Economist, Schneier is an internationally renowned security technologist and best-selling author of over a dozen books – including his latest, Click Here to Kill Everybody, exploring the risks and implications of our new, hyper-connected era. He works at the intersection of security, technology, and people, and has penned hundreds of articles, essays, and academic papers on these topics.

Exclusively represented by Leading Authorities speakers bureau, Schneier is known for his refreshingly candid and lucid analysis of our networked world and has been labeled “one of the world’s foremost security experts.” In speeches, he captivates audiences with his candor and know-how, laying out common-sense policies to enjoy the benefits of this omnipotent age without falling prey to the consequences of its insecurity.

Schneier has written over a dozen books, including the New York Times best-seller Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World. His other books explore cryptography, computer and network security, trust, and the intersection of security, technology, and society.

With a readership of over 250,000, Schneier also publishes a free monthly newsletter, Crypto-Gram and blog, Schneier on Security, explaining, debunking, and drawing lessons from security stories that make the news. Often the go-to source for cyber security information, he is regularly quoted in the press, a frequent guest on television and radio, and has served on several government committees, even testifying before Congress.

An active member in the security community, Schneier is a fellow at the Berkman-Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, and a lecturer in Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School. He is also a board member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, AccessNow, and the Tor Project, an advisory board member of the Electronic Privacy Information Center and VerifiedVoting.org, and the chief of security architecture at Inrupt, Inc.

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Bruce Schneier: "Click Here to Kill Everybody" | Talks at Google

The Security Mirage - Bruce Schneier

What You Need to Know About Security in Government: Bruce Schneier

Decoding the AI Revolution: Implications for Security and Society. Security technologist Bruce Schneier is among the most respected voices when it comes to analyzing artificial intelligence and its impact on business and society. He has published countless essays and is sought after by groups to speak on the following AI-related topics:

  • Navigating the Path to AI Safety. In an increasingly connected world, the rapid advancement of AI presents both incredible opportunities and unprecedented risks as we strive to harness the potential of AI to transform industries and improve our lives. With deep understanding of information security and unique insights into the intersection of tech, policy, and society, Schneier leads a multifaceted exploration into the technical aspects of how we can promote security as the ubiquity of AI increases at a rapid rate, as well as the broader implications on organizations, individual privacy, societal stability, and global security.
  • AI Security Matters. AI has transformed industries, economies, and societies, and helped organizations reimagine what’s possible for their businesses. While AI presents countless opportunities for innovation and growth, we must still be cognizant of the challenges it poses to information security. In this keynote, Schneier unravels the intricate web of risks and opportunities that AI presents as he addresses issues related to its vulnerabilities, ethical considerations, and unpredictability, while underscoring the skills anyone can tap into to build resilient systems that can withstand unforeseen challenges and effectively navigate the complexities of AI security.  
  • Preserving Privacy in the Age of AI. Bruce Schneier provides a comprehensive overview of the evolving concept of privacy in the digital age with AI front and center. He discusses the implications of AI’s ability to process massive amounts of personal data, its role in predictive analysis, and the potential erosion of personal boundaries. With the lines being blurred between explicit consent and the implications of AI systems making decisions without human intervention, Schneier examines the role of policy and regulation protecting individual privacy as it relates to AI, and emphasizes the principles of privacy-by-design principles in AI development.
  • AI’s Data Dependency Dilemma. The convergence of AI and data collection has raised profound questions about personal privacy, ethical considerations, and the boundaries of data utilization. Drawing from his expertise as a leading security technologist, Schneier breaks down issues related to informed consent, data ownership, and other concerns related to the vast amounts of personal data that powers AI. Schneier also acknowledges the potential benefits of data-driven AI for revolutionizing organizations and industries, while putting forth practical solutions for upholding the security of sensitive information.
  • AI’s Role in Reinventing Democracy. Bruce Schneier draws upon his expertise to discuss the pressing need to reevaluate and redesign systems of governance that were created in the 18th century to better suit the challenges and opportunities of the 21st century. In this talk, he emphasizes the misalignment of incentives, the vulnerabilities of current systems to hacking, and the increasing risks posed by powerful technologies, while also exploring the idea that governance should be viewed as an information system and proposing novel approaches to democratize decision-making, enhance security, and foster communication.
  • The AI Risk Landscape. As AI-powered systems become increasingly integrated into our lives, it’s crucial to understand the potential risk and biases that come with them. Bruce Schneier delves into the intricate relationship between AI systems and their users, examining the opportunities, as well as challenges, such as “surveillance capitalism” and its potential implications in the digital realm. As Schneier offers organizations and individuals the insights they need to make more informed decisions around AI, he advocates for increased transparency, ethical guidelines, and regulatory oversight in the development and the deployment of AI systems.
  • AI’s Next Act: What Does the Future Look Like? How should we be thinking about AI in the long term? As AI continues to evolve at an unprecedented pace, the transformative impact on industries, the workplace, and the entire human experience is becoming increasingly tangible. What are some potential opportunities, challenges, and ethical considerations as we look ahead? And how will we collaborate to put forth policies and regulations that help to shape a future where AI aligns with human values and aspirations? Bruce Schneier provides a holistic view of the complex landscape that lies ahead while helping groups envision a world where AI enriches our lives while respecting our values and safeguarding our security.

Securing Society by Hacking Society. A hacker mindset is essential to understanding the security of complex technological systems. This way of thinking applies much more broadly: not only to socio-technical systems but to purely social systems as well. Tax loopholes, for example, can be understood as hacks of the tax code. Disinformation campaigns can be understood as hacks of the democratic election process. This talk extends the core language of hacking to the broad systems that underlie our society. Bruce Schneier will talk about what it means to hack the law, to hack the market economy, and to hack the democratic process. Others have written about how social-engineering hacks trust and authority, and how social-media sites hack attention. He will generalize this further, discussing how our cognitive systems are hacked. Finally, he will extend these notions to discuss artificial intelligence and robotics; these systems will hack what it means to be human, and also how we react to things we react to as human. In the 21st century, everything is a socio-technical system, and everything is vulnerable to hacking. Our experience and expertise are necessary to secure these systems. Schneier’s goal is to explain how we can do that.

The Coming AI Hackers. Hacking is inherently a creative process. It's finding a vulnerability in a system: something the system allows, but is unintended and unanticipated by the system's creators — something that follows the rules of the system but subverts its intent. Normally, we think of hacking as something done to computer systems, but we can extend this conceptualization to any system of rules. The tax code can be hacked; vulnerabilities are called loopholes and exploits are called tax avoidance strategies. Financial markets can be hacked. So can any system of laws, or democracy itself. This is a human endeavor, but we can imagine a world where AIs can be hackers. AIs are already finding new vulnerabilities in computer code and loopholes in contracts. We need to consider a world where hacks or our social, economic, and political systems are discovered computer speeds, and then exploited at computer scale. Right now, our approach of "patching" these systems operate at human speeds, which won't nearly be enough. In this talk, security expert Bruce Schneier explores the risks that the coming AI hackers pose to organizational and societal systems, while underscoring the importance of moving beyond patching the flaws in our current systems and sharing the steps that need to be taken in order to protect against the possibility of hacks.              

Securing a World of Physically Capable Computers. Computer security is no longer about data; it’s about life and property. This change makes an enormous difference, and will shake up our industry in many ways. First, data authentication and integrity will become more important than confidentiality. And second, our largely regulation-free Internet will become a thing of the past. Soon we will no longer have a choice between government regulation and no government regulation. Our choice is between smart government regulation and not-so-smart government regulation. Given this future, it’s vital that we look back at what we’ve learned from past attempts to secure these systems, and forward at what technologies, laws, regulations, economic incentives, and social norms we need to secure them in the future.  

Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World. Much of surveillance is voluntary: we cooperate with corporate surveillance because it promises us convenience, and we submit to government surveillance because it promises us protection. The result is a mass surveillance society of our own making. But have we given up more than we’ve gained? In this speech, security expert Bruce Schneier offers another path, one that values both security and privacy. He shows audiences what they can do to reform our government surveillance programs and shake up surveillance-based business models, while also providing tips to protect their privacy every day. Your attendees will never look at their phone, their computer, their credit cards, or even their car in the same way again.

Security Technology in the Public Interest. Computer security is now a public policy issue. Election security, blockchain, “going dark,” the vulnerabilities equities debate, IoT safety, data privacy, algorithmic security and fairness, critical infrastructure: these are all important public policy issues with a strong Internet security component. But while an understanding of the technology involved is fundamental to crafting good policy, there is little involvement of technologists in policy discussions. This is not sustainable. We need public-interest technologists: people from our fields helping craft policy and working to provide security to agencies and groups working in the broader public interest. We need these people in government, at NGOs, teaching at universities, as part of the press, and inside private companies. This is increasingly critical to both public safety and overall social welfare. This talk both describes the current state of public-interest technology, and offers a way forward for us individually and collectively for our field. The defining policy question of the Internet age is this: How much of our lives should be governed by technology, and under what terms? We need to be involved in that debate.

Liars and Outliers: Enabling the Trust that Society Needs to Thrive. Human society runs on trust.  We all trust millions of people, organizations, and systems every day -- and we do it so easily that we barely notice.  But in any system of trust, there is an alternative, parasitic, strategy that involves abusing that trust.  Making sure those defectors don’t destroy the cooperative systems they’re abusing is an age-old problem, one that we’ve solved through morals and ethics, laws, and all sort of security technologies.  Understanding how these all work -- and fail -- is essential to understanding the problems we face in today’s increasingly technological and interconnected world.  In this talk, Bruce Schneier, world-renowned for his level-headed thinking on security and technology, tackles this complex subject head-on. Weaving together ideas from across the social and biological sciences to explain how society induces trust, he shows audiences how trust works and fails in social settings, communities, organizations, countries, and the world.

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