Excerpts: “Because these algorithms essentially program themselves, it can be impossible for humans to understand what they do ” (p. 82).

“The market won’t improve things as long as there’s more near-term profit to be had in spying on us and selling our data, keeping security details secret from consumers and users, and ignoring security and hoping for the best. Governments won’t improve things as long as they’re largely controlled by corporate lobbyists, and by organizations, like the NSA and Justice Department, that prefer spying to security.” (p. 101).

“At best, mass surveillance can only ever buy society time. Even then, it wouldn’t be very effective. Surveillance is more effective at social control than at crime prevention, which is why it’s such a popular tool among authoritarian governments” (p. 202).

“But as with most human endeavors, we need to continue hammering away to shape the emerging Internet+ into a medium that embodies and enables the human ideals of trust, security, resilience, peace, and justice the best it can” (p. 215).

“My pessimism arises more from the US’s collective inability to imagine government as a force for good in the world. When I review the current Internet security landscape, I see an environment shaped by corporate decisions to maximize profits and government abdication of its regulatory role to protect all citizens. I see a populace mesmerized by the frankly amazing capabilities of these new networked technologies, and negligent in considering the stupendously profound social repercussions of it all” (p. 219).

“More generally, we need to start making moral and ethical and political decisions about how the Internet+ should work. We’ve built a world where programmers had an inherent right to code the world as they wanted to see it, indemnified against any harm they might have caused along the way. We accepted it because what they decided didn’t matter very much. Now it very much matters, and I think this privilege needs to end” (p. 225)

Schneier, Bruce (2018). Click Here To Kill Everybody: Security and Survival in a Hyper-connected World. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.