Top 120 Bruce Schneier Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “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

52. “The very definition of news is something that hardly ever happens. If an incident is in the news, we shouldn’t worry about it. It’s when something is so common that its no longer news – car crashes, domestic violence – that we should worry.”

— Bruce Schneier

53. “I tell people if it’s in the news don’t worry about it. Because by definition news is something that almost never happens.”

— Bruce Schneier

54. “We need to resist the urge to do something, regardless of whether or not the proposed action is effective.”

— Bruce Schneier

55. “Surveillance of power is one of the most important ways to ensure that power does not abuse its status. But, of course, power does not like to be watched.”

— Bruce Schneier

56. “Societies without a reservoir of people who don’t follow the rules lack an important mechanism for societal evolution. Vibrant societies need a dishonest minority; if society makes its dishonest minority too small, it stifles dissent as well as common crime.”

— Bruce Schneier

57. “Corporate and government surveillance aren’t separate; they’re an alliance of interests.”

— Bruce Schneier

58. “We kill people based on metadata.”

— Bruce Schneier

59. “It is sort of interesting that in our society this days we are very quick to apply the term ‘war’ to places where thare are no actual wars, and loath to apply the term ‘war’ when we are actually fighting wars.”

— Bruce Schneier

60. “Surveillance is the business model of the Internet.”

— Bruce Schneier

61. “It is poor civic hygiene to install technologies that could someday facilitate a police state.”

— Bruce Schneier

62. “Secret courts making secret rulings on secret laws, and companies flagrantly lying to consumers about the insecurity of their products and services, undermine the very foundations of our society.”

— Bruce Schneier

63. “Philosopher Jeremy Bentham conceived of his “panopticon” in the late 1700s as a way to build cheaper prisons. His idea was a prison where every inmate could be surveilled at any time, unawares. The inmate would have no choice but to assume that he was always being watched, and would therefore conform. This idea has been used as a metaphor for mass personal data collection, both on the Internet and off.”

— Bruce Schneier

64. “The world now knows that US telcos give the NSA access to the Internet backbone and that US cloud providers give it access to user accounts.”

— Bruce Schneier

65. “This is not the internet the world needs, or the internet its creators envisioned. We need to take it back. And by we, I mean the engineering community.”

— Bruce Schneier

66. “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

67. “Surveillance is the business model of the Internet for two primary reasons: people like free, and people like convenient. The truth is, though, that people aren’t given much of a choice. It’s either surveillance or nothing, and the surveillance is conveniently invisible so you don’t have to think about it.”

— Bruce Schneier

68. “You can think of the difference between tactical and strategic oversight as the difference between doing things right and doing the right things. Both are required.”

— Bruce Schneier

69. “Despite fearful rhetoric to the contrary, terrorism is not a transcendent threat. A terrorist attack cannot possibly destroy our country’s way of life; it’s only our reaction to that attack that can do that kind of damage.”

— Bruce Schneier

70. “Why is it that we all – myself included – believe these stories? Why are we so quick to assume that the TSA is a bunch of jack-booted thugs, officious and arbitrary and drunk with power? It’s because everything seems so arbitrary, because there’s no accountability or transparency in the DHS.”

— Bruce Schneier

71. “Terrorists can only take my life. Only my government can take my freedom.”

— Bruce Schneier

72. “Our relationship with many of the Internet companies we rely on is not a traditional company–customer relationship. That’s primarily because we’re not customers. We’re products those companies sell to their real customers. The relationship is more feudal than commercial. The companies are analogous to feudal lords, and we are their vassals, peasants, and – on a bad day – serfs. We are tenant farmers for these companies, working on their land by producing data that they in turn sell for profit.”

— Bruce Schneier

73. “Anyone, from the most clueless amateur to the best cryptographer, can create an algorithm that he himself can’t break.”

— Bruce Schneier

74. “We can’t keep weapons out of prisons; we can’t possibly expect to keep them out of airports.”

— Bruce Schneier

75. “Opting out just isn’t a viable choice for most of us, most of the time; it violates what have become very real norms of contemporary life.”

— Bruce Schneier

76. “Embedded in digital photos is information such as the date, time, and location – yes, many cameras have GPS – of the photo’s capture; generic information about the camera, lens, and settings; and an ID number of the camera itself. If you upload the photo to the web, that information often remains attached to the file.”

— Bruce Schneier

77. “It’s frustrating; terrorism is rare and largely ineffectual, yet we regularly magnify the effects of both their successes and failures by terrorizing ourselves.”

— Bruce Schneier

78. “Chaos is hard to create, even on the Internet.”

— Bruce Schneier

79. “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

80. “Given the credible estimate that we’ve spent $1 trillion on anti-terrorism security.”

— Bruce Schneier

81. “If you have nothing to hide, then you have nothing to fear.” This is a dangerously narrow conception of the value of privacy. Privacy is an essential human need, and central to our ability to control how we relate to the world. Being stripped of privacy is fundamentally dehumanizing, and it makes no difference whether the surveillance is conducted by an undercover policeman following us around or by a computer algorithm tracking our every move.”

— Bruce Schneier

82. “Microsoft knows that reliable software is not cost effective. According to studies, 90% to 95% of all bugs are harmless. They’re never discovered by users, and they don’t affect performance. It’s much cheaper to release buggy software and fix the 5% to 10% of bugs people find and complain about.”

— Bruce Schneier

83. “It doesn’t matter how good the card is if the issuance process is flawed.”

— Bruce Schneier

84. “In 2015, a petabyte of cloud storage will cost $100,000 per year, down 90% from $1 million in 2011.”

— Bruce Schneier

85. “Many cyberweapons manufacturers sell hacking tools to governments worldwide. For example, FinFisher is an “offensive IT Intrusion solution,” according to the promotional material from the UK and German company that makes it, Gamma Group.”

— Bruce Schneier

86. “By 2010, we as a species were creating more data per day than we did from the beginning of time until 2003.”

— Bruce Schneier

87. “Surveillance is the business model of the Internet for two primary reasons: people like free, and people like convenient.”

— Bruce Schneier

88. “This is why regulation based on the concept of “personally identifying information” doesn’t work. PII is usually defined as a name, unique account number, and so on, and special rules apply to it. But PII is also about the amount of data; the more information someone has about you, even anonymous information, the easier it is for her to identify you.”

— Bruce Schneier

89. “Apple has a worldwide database of Wi-Fi passwords, including my home network’s, from people backing up their iPhones.”

— Bruce Schneier

90. “US government secrecy has exploded. No one knows the exact number – it’s secret, of course – but reasonable estimates are that hundreds of billions of pages of government documents are classified in the US each year.”

— Bruce Schneier

91. “Mug shot extortion sites turn this sort of thing into a business. Mug shots are public record, but they’re not readily available. Owners of mug shot sites acquire the photos in bulk and publish them online, where everybody can find them, then charge individuals to remove their photos from the sites.”

— Bruce Schneier

92. “For years, well before consumer tracking became the norm, Radio Shack stores would routinely ask their customers for their addresses and phone numbers. For a while I just refused, but that was socially awkward. Instead, I got in the habit of replying with “9800 Savage Road, Columbia, MD, 20755”: the address of the NSA.”

— Bruce Schneier

93. “The nature of computerized systems makes it easier for the attacker to find one exploitable vulnerability in a system than for the defender to find and fix all vulnerabilities in the system.”

— Bruce Schneier

94. “I used to say that Google knows more about what I’m thinking of than my wife does. But that doesn’t go far enough. Google knows more about what I’m thinking of than I do, because Google remembers all of it perfectly and forever.”

— Bruce Schneier

95. “Or we fear terrorists more than the police, even though in the US you’re nine times more likely to.”

— Bruce Schneier

96. “The science and engineering of programming just isn’t good enough to produce flawless software, and that isn’t going to change anytime soon. The.”

— Bruce Schneier

97. “Buy American Doesn’t Sell Well Anymore Because It Means Give A Copy To The NSA.”

— Bruce Schneier

98. “One analysis of 2013 financial reports calculated that the value of each user to Google is $40 per year, and only $6 to Facebook, LinkedIn, and Yahoo. This is why companies like Google and Facebook keep raising the ante.”

— Bruce Schneier

99. “Retail store surveillance systems register our presence, even if we are doing nothing but browsing and even if we pay for everything in cash.”

— Bruce Schneier

100. “Innocents and criminals alike use cell phones, e-mail, and Dropbox. It rains on the just and the unjust.”

— Bruce Schneier