All right, my friends, welcome back to Anti-War Radio on Chaos 92.7 FM in Austin, Texas, streaming live worldwide on the internet, ChaosRadioAustin.org and AntiWar.com slash radio.
And introducing today's guest, Bruce Schneier.
He is the Chief Technical Officer of BT Counterpain and is the author of Beyond Fear, Thinking Sensibly About Security in an Uncertain World.
He writes Security Matters for Wired Magazine.
Welcome to the show, Bruce.
Hey, thanks for having me.
It's good to have you here.
How are you doing?
I'm doing fine.
Oh, that's good.
Now, in a way, I'm sorry to bring you on the show to discuss a column that you wrote more than six months ago, but I'm trying to reintroduce this concept to the radio show.
It's something I was trying to regularly cover and sort of got out of the habit, and that is the bogus terrorism cases prosecuted by the FBI and the Justice Department in this country.
And I agree with the statement you make in your article that there really is a terrorist threat, and we really, seemingly at least, we need the FBI and federal agencies to protect us from this enemy that, of course, they helped create back in the day.
But anyway, it seems like they do nothing but run around trying to trick some kid into saying something stupid into a microphone in order to win a terror case, rather than find actual terrorists and do their actual job.
And in this article that you wrote, Portrait of the Terrorist as an Idiot, of the Modern Terrorist as an Idiot, in WIRED, you just go through the list of bogus, high-profile, bogus terrorism cases prosecuted by this government since September 11th, and it's really quite remarkable.
And you start off, of course, with the plot to blow up the John F. Kennedy Airport in New York.
Why don't you tell us a little bit about that one?
So this was, I mean, it hit the news, and it was a big deal, right, that the terrorists are going to try to blow up JFK.
And the plot, when you heard about it, kind of made no sense.
I mean, the idea was to blow up the fuel tanks and have it somehow spread through the fuel tanks and then blow up the airport, I mean, it's very much a fiction plot.
You'd see it in a dumb movie.
And the person who was planning it, Russell, I think his name is DeFriest, I'm probably mispronouncing it, I mean, really had no idea what he was doing.
He didn't even have a map of the airport.
He didn't even have any way to get explosives.
He didn't understand any of the chemistry involved.
And this was, you know, this was a terrorist.
When you start digging in, it seems like he was certainly egged on by an informant.
So there's this convicted drug dealer who was the FBI informant in this case.
And it's hard to tell if this guy, he wasn't a kid, he was older, was doing anything more than just spouting off, if he had any ability to do this at all.
And he is a high-profile terrorist arrest.
Now there are other cases where there are FBI agents and they border on entrapment.
The case of the guy arrested for buying a surface-to-air missile several years ago.
I mean, that was an FBI sting operation where if it wasn't the FBI, he wouldn't have bought anything.
He wouldn't know how to buy anything.
So it's not that these guys are not a little nutty.
I mean, they're certainly a little nutty.
They might even be criminals.
But you know, terrorist masterminds is being way too kind to these people.
Yeah, I mean, when you look at the Al-Qaeda ploy, you had these guys who, you know, were these religious students in Germany who went to Afghanistan, were recruited by Osama bin Laden and, you know, presumably Zawahiri, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed personally, and dedicated and sent on this mission.
They were not the goofball from the Islamic bookstore down the street who's always got something to say, but none of it necessarily makes any sense and he doesn't have any resources to do anything about it.
Right.
And the problem is if the FBI just comes along and sort of eggs you on and gives you resources and gives you ideas, you know, they're seeing where the plots are suggested by the FBI agent.
You know, it's a little bit scary that we're starting to see this.
The Fort Dix plotters, remember them?
They were arrested because of a video they made and someone found it.
There was also an FBI informant in that case who seems to have come up with the idea, right?
And the idea is, and I'm not making this up, we're going to dress up as pizza delivery guys, sneak into the army base, and then do terrorist things.
I mean, you know, if you saw us in a comic book, you'd laugh.
And you know that one too, the Fort Dixon, the training base where everybody's rifle is loaded for bear at all times.
Yeah, I mean, it's not the kind of thing you want to do.
There's actually news today about this in China.
We've just gotten a news report that I just read today that they've arrested a criminal gang who was planning a terrorist attack at the Olympics, and a terrorist attack reminiscent of 1972 Munich.
They were going to kidnap athletes.
So again, we're left, and I'm reading the article, and I don't know how much of this is real.
I mean, you know, China is doing a lot to try to show that they're trying to secure their Olympics and being good on the world stage with all the protests.
For this to come, you know, right now, today, I'm looking at it, and it smells kind of funny, right?
There could be a real plot, or it could be just like some of these things we've seen in our country, where they found a group that was talking about it and made it a big international incident.
We might see more as this unfolds, this is the first day of the news.
But like a lot of the American cases, we end up not seeing the evidence.
And this is a big problem.
A lot of these cases are settled, and we don't see the evidence.
So if you remember the Lackawanna Six, a few months after September 11th, they were arrested in Albany, New York.
The paintball terrorists.
Right.
And they...
Oh, no, those were the Virginia guys who were the paintball terrorists.
Right.
I'm not sure what they were doing, but they were arrested, and they plea bargained.
They were told something like, you know, we won't let this go to trial, so if you don't want to go to Guantanamo, you've got to plead guilty.
Right, right.
Which is very scary, because we never see any of the evidence.
Yeah, imagine if a prosecutor told you that, here's your plea bargain, you either plead guilty to all charges, or we'll just declare you an enemy combatant and turn you over to the Navy.
And that's very dangerous, because once that happens, there is no justice.
Because there is no defense.
There's no right to defense.
It's very scary.
The Miami Seven last year, people remember this one, they were going to blow up the Sears Tower.
Seven people in Miami, they were arrested.
And they had no weapons, no bombs, no expertise, no money, no operational skill, all they had is this cool idea, from their opinion, let's blow up the Sears Tower.
Well, and even in that case, when you really look at it, it's pretty clear that what they were really doing was, they thought they were scamming the FBI informant out of a bunch of money.
They were trying to.
They weren't going to blow up anything.
Right.
But now, you don't want to say these guys aren't potentially dangerous.
I mean, they're most likely low-life.
A lot of these are actual criminals.
But the fear is that when you start calling these people terrorists, I mean, all of these were big, big press splashes, where government officials get in front of the cameras and say, you know, we've saved America yet again.
You know, we have stopped this potentially dangerous plot.
The stuff that came out after Fort Dix was just funny.
They were saying, I mean, I have a quote from a U.S. attorney, the devastation that would be caused had this plot succeeded is just unthinkable.
But our inspector, it had the potential to be another 9-11.
These people are deluded that this plot had no potential to be anything.
So it's not that we shouldn't, you know, go after these people, possibly arrest them, maybe convict them of things they've done.
But to call them international terrorist masterminds, to put these things on the level of September 11th, is really just propaganda and doesn't make sense.
And even worse, if we start entrapping people, if we start creating these terrorists to fuel up propaganda campaigns, then it's sort of another level entirely.
Yeah, that's really the, well, there's two real threats there.
First of all is the crying wolf thing where, like you said, the Chinese claim to have busted this plot.
And we have every reason to be completely suspicious of whether it was even real or not.
And you could get to the situation where you actually do have real threats and nobody takes them seriously anymore.
We have the distraction of the FBI as they're basically, you know, running around prosecuting these cases, investigating and putting all these resources into these cases that most of which could have just as easily been left to the state police or the local, you know, city cops or something like that, while they're supposed to be protecting us from Bin Laden's guys.
Right.
And there's actually, I know on your website you linked to my article, there's another article I sort of recommend for you and listeners who are interested in this, Rolling Stone, who actually does good investigative reporting, sort of, let that be said, has an article called The Fear Factory.
And if you just type Fear Factory in Rolling Stone to Google, you'll find it.
And they're writing about the Joint Terrorism Task Forces, which is what you're saying, the FBI getting involved, the local, everybody getting involved, and talking about the entrapment that when you have over a hundred task forces in this country devoted exclusively to fighting terrorism, what they're going to do is find terrorists, and if they're not there, they're going to make them and find them.
And the fear is, yes, you know, the crying wolf certainly, but more that there is going to be real fear, that we are creating fear among everybody, all of us, because now people think the terrorists are everywhere, when in fact they're not.
So that's real.
And I sort of urge listeners to read this Rolling Stone article, it's very well written, and talks a lot about the same issues I did, did investigative reporting into these terrorism task forces.
You know, a friend of mine called and said, I figured out how to make a billion dollars.
We'll sell terrorism insurance to people in the Midwest.
You know, there's a lot of that, and it's less insurance, and you see it in some of the products.
People see, you know, nuclear radiation detection kits, or, you know, chemical weapon protection kits.
They sold better in the months of September 11th, and now a little more rationality is back.
But yes, if you are in the terrorism industry, right, selling cameras, selling fingerprint readers, it behooves you for the nation to be in fear.
You know, very much it's the military-industrial complex becoming a terrorism-industrial complex.
That isn't an exaggeration.
There's a whole industry designed to sell security that you'll only buy if you feel insecure.
Yeah.
Well, and see, that's the thing.
Going back to the, not just sort of the overblown prosecutions, but the just completely wild statements by the media and the, you know, U.S. Attorney's offices and the congressmen and so forth, when these cases come down, as, you know, even though nothing blew up, they basically are trying to get us as traumatized, try to get us to remember how we felt on 9-11, that kind of thing, and really jerk our chain with each one of these things.
Right, and that's exactly right.
It's very hard to separate the real from the hype, and so much of this is hype.
It's very political, and, you know, there is value in people being afraid, and that's unfortunate, because if you think about it, the way to defeat terrorism is not to be afraid.
I mean, the goal of the terrorist is to make you afraid, right?
Terrorism is a crime against the mind.
It uses a horrific physical action, but it is magnified by our feelings.
I mean, you do a thought experiment.
Nobody reported on a terrorist event, it wouldn't have any effect.
It would have an effect as a criminal act, but it wouldn't have an effect as a terrorist act.
The fact that the news media reports it is what makes it terrorism.
Now, of course, I'm not saying the news media should not report the news, and that won't work, but it is a crime that is magnified by our emotions.
And if we are fearful, if we live our life in fear, we are doing exactly what the terrorists want.
It's funny, it's been like that ever since 9-11, too, and, you know, I guess anybody could tell you, right, who pays attention to these sorts of things, the terrorist tactic, it's all about the reaction.
It's about trying to get you to react.
And it seems like, whether it's in our foreign policy, or just, you know, the way the media talks to the American people about these kind of issues or whatever, it seems like we do nothing but just go straight out of the Bin Laden playbook about how we're supposed to react to his attack against us.
It's kind of amazing.
They should have imagined if the President stood up on December 11th and said, you know, we are stronger than this, we are better than this, this is not going to affect how we, we are not going to bow to the terrorists.
We are not going to let them dictate our foreign policy, our domestic policy, we're not going to let them affect our liberties, our freedoms, our way of life.
We are stronger than this.
And if he said that, there would have been a very different reaction.
And it would have been exactly what the terrorists didn't want.
What they wanted is this overreaction.
And that's unfortunate.
And, you know, there's a whole lot of serious foreign policy things we have to do, you know, sort of to improve the world situation.
And I'm not denying them, but we also have to not be fearful.
What makes our country great are the freedoms that Bin Laden hates.
And to remove them, to mitigate them, to lessen them, in an effort to be secure, A, doesn't work and B, gives him what he wants.
Right.
And on that first point about it doesn't work, the trade between liberty and security, I'm reminded of Ron Paul's statements from the presidential campaign that rather than, you know, passing the Transportation Security Administration Act and nationalizing airport security, for example, what they should have done was deregulated airport security, which was already regulated from top to bottom, forbid people from fighting back against terrorists, refused, you know, forbid pilots from carrying weapons on the planes, even though 99 percent of them are Air Force veterans and so forth.
And that he brought up armored cars.
He says, you know, we don't need the government to run our armored cars up and down our streets every day.
And and, you know, what, one out of every 10,000 of those gets hijacked.
There's a whole lot of of of equal equal muddiness in the Ron Paul stuff.
I mean, you know, having airport security run by corporations is just plain dumb.
Arming airplane pilots is even dumber.
I mean, there's a whole lot of dumbness in that.
I mean, some of the stuff he said was smart, but you be careful.
You know, it's really easy to say, get the government out of it.
But then you start having corporate interests which.
Aren't you know, aren't necessarily better and in some cases worse.
And, you know, if you may, I mean, they're probably the air pilots should fly airplanes.
If if they are better marksmen than they are pilots, give them a gun and make them and make them sky marshals.
They are better pilots.
Put them in the pilot cabin.
Lock the door.
They're not supposed to come out shooting.
That's just, you know.
And when we had it, we had an accident about a month ago where some armed pilot, the gun went off.
Great.
You know, it would be it would be the kind of stuff we want.
But yeah, I mean, there's a whole lot of dumb stuff the government is doing in reaction.
I mean, no argument there.
Well, it would seem like, you know, if you internalize the costs on to the airlines that they would just hire, they'd have their own sky marshals.
I mean, the federal government put sky marshals on one out of every five hundred flights or something.
Right.
You can't internalize the costs.
The problem is that too many externalities, unless you make the airlines liable for all the economic effects of the terrorist attack and everything, there are still externalities.
When you have major externalities and terrorism is a great example, the good, the companies will not spend the money to do the defense because it's because, you know, we live in a capitalist society.
So companies are not public charities.
They'll spend money in proportion to their corporate liability, not the national liability.
So airlines are a great example.
I mean, the cost to the airline, the American airline United, of the attack was just a small percentage of the entire cost to the nation.
And if American and United are smart companies, they will spend equal in risk to the cost to them.
And the residual cost is just left undealt with.
You need a government entity to solve that problem.
Well, I guess I see where you're coming from with that.
But it seems like if it was up to American and United, they would at least whatever resources, even if you think they weren't enough, whatever resources they dedicated, the problem would probably be used effectively.
Whereas the TSA, they just spend money on on Jack and old ladies for their nail clippers.
No, no, it would be just as bad.
It wouldn't be any better.
I mean, if you think about it before, I mean, at 9-11, airlines funded airport security.
So if you want to know what you want to look like, that's what it was.
Well, I think the federalizing TSA was actually a smart move because it's all about the externalities.
And that makes sense.
I mean, yeah, the TSA is run pretty incompetently, but having it be corporate run isn't going to magically make that better.
I mean, there's nothing there's nothing magic about a corporation that means the stuff it does is better.
There's like nothing magic about a government that means the stuff it does isn't good.
Yeah, but I'm not talking about magic.
I mean, what we're talking about here is economic incentives.
That's not magic.
Right.
The economic incentive for the airline is to do as little as it could possibly get away with.
Right.
And the economic incentive for the government is to fail so they can get more money next time.
No, no, no, no.
I mean, this is this is this gets in sort of more nuttiness.
The world's more complicated.
I mean, that's that's that's kind of simple stuff sounds good, but it doesn't work.
OK, well, but haven't we just been talking about the FBI prosecuting nobodies for nothing for 20 minutes?
20 minutes.
Of course.
And you can go into history and look at company towns and corporate owned security doing the same thing.
It's not about whether it's corporate or government.
I mean, the way the way you solve these problems is not by giving the corporations.
Right.
I mean, that's how you get other bad stuff.
The way you solve them is mutually distrustful parties watching each other.
I mean, the big the interesting thing, if you think about libertarianism and sort of basic philosophy, is that government is government is bad because and corporations are good.
What they missed is not government.
That's bad.
It's power.
Power.
Yeah, but that's I think that's that's quite a mischaracterization of libertarianism.
It's not that corporations are good.
It's that market forces are more effective means of checks and balances than voting.
So but that only works when they are.
So it's really easy for me, for example, and it's getting a file a field for for me to fire Coke and buy Pepsi.
That's really easy.
But for me to fire my cell phone company is a lot harder when you start seeing corporations amass government like power in that the switching costs become high, they start acting more like government.
And when you have government where the switching costs are low, they start being more beholden.
So back when you invented libertarianism, power was government.
And there was no such thing as lock in in products.
So you had a very easy dichotomy.
But when you have notions of lock in, I mean, you should mean you can try right now.
Go try to fire your computer operating system company.
It's very, very hard.
There's a lot they can do that Coke and Pepsi couldn't because it's really easy to fire them.
That's notional lock in.
And you have lock in in both in both products that you buy and in government that you effectively buy when you vote.
So it's with that's really the issue.
How easy is it to switch?
What are the switching costs?
What are the externalities?
How does the lock in work?
So it's not, you know, corporate good, government bad, because, you know, it's easier to it's easier to get a new product is to vote out a bad government.
It can be hard in both cases.
It can be easy in both cases.
And there are lots of things where a government where we're we're a decision process that doesn't happen at the point of purchase works better.
So for example, you could imagine, you know, an airline competing on security, right?
More secure airlines, we run background checks on everybody, or less secure airlines, right?
Get through security faster.
And you can imagine that kind of market, but in a sense doesn't make any sense, and you're not going to see it.
It actually makes more sense for society to standardize that, to run it as external to the business.
Because the security is primarily an externality to the business.
Mm hmm.
Well, as you're saying, but just in the news this week about how the FAA spent all their time helping the airlines cover up what pieces of garbage many of their planes were becoming and how the guys at the FAA that tried to do their job got fired.
And really, the FAA's purpose is to protect the regulaties.
And you have a lot of that.
I mean, and there's an example of why corporate regulation is just bad.
And what that is, is that's a co-option of a regulatory agency by the regulated companies.
Very, very common.
Something you have to watch for all the time.
You see it again and again and again.
But certainly, I mean, if in fact the regulated bodies like the airlines didn't have the FAA, covering up would be easier, right?
There wouldn't be less cover up.
There'd be more.
So, you know, none of this is perfect.
I mean, this is government, right?
You know, democracy, the worst form of government except for all the others.
I mean, this is hard stuff.
The answer, in as much as you can get it, is sunlight.
If we can discuss the FBI and what they're doing, then suddenly they can't get away with it.
If we can discuss the airlines and what they're doing with maintenance, it's a lot harder to get away with.
So when you have these power centers, whether government power centers or corporate power centers, the way you reduce the power is through information, is through, you know, free press, open discussion, fewer secrets, so that more of this can get out.
I mean, that's how people get enough power to be a player in this.
So, you know, I tend to look and I see these problems for the solutions in finding multiple parties who distrust each other to watch each other.
Yeah, multiple separations of power and checks and balances of as many kinds as you can get.
It's outside of government, right?
You need government.
You need corporations.
You need NGOs.
You need advocacy groups.
You need the press.
You need us all.
We all have to be playing here.
You know what I really like?
The groups of non-profit lawyers that sue the government all day.
Those are phenomenal, right?
The EFF is suing the government on wireless eavesdropping, wireless wiretapping, suing AT&T.
And they're changing national policy.
And these are, I mean, Bush calls them the highly paid attorneys making money off this.
I mean, I know many of them.
They're, you know, paid one-fifth they get at a major law firm.
They're not making money off this.
They're doing it for the good of all of us.
You know, we should thank the EFF.
And it's Electronic Frontier Foundation, EFF.org.
I should plug them.
Go to their website and go see what they're doing.
They're defending your, our, everybody's liberty.
It's Bruce Schneier from Wired.
He writes Security Matters.
And now, in just sort of browsing through your archives, it seems like really your expertise is in injecting realism into matters of security in all different kinds of realms in terms of computers and terrorism cases and all sorts of things.
That's really your thing, right?
Is realism rather than paranoia.
A lot of what I do is sort of explain what's really going on.
My career is very much a series of generalizations.
I've learned my expertise in computer security.
And then since so many systems use computers, I started working on voting and ID cards.
And then a lot of the methodologies we came up with to evaluate security systems in the computer world work in the real world, too.
So we talk about airlines and terrorism.
And a lot of it is sort of exposing what I think is the hype and paranoia and just the weird security stuff in the world and trying to inject realism, common sense, rationality back into the debate.
So that's a good characterization.
You know, there's a headline today about Michael Chertoff saying, first of all, he says that the cybercrime threat is on par with 9-11.
Of course, everything is just like 9-11.
And then from Raw Story today, Homeland Security invokes a nuclear bomb in the Manhattan Project as they work on this new cybersecurity program.
They're comparing it to the Manhattan Project.
Do you know anything about what's going on there?
Well, actually, Mr. Chertoff was at a conference I was at, and he gave that talk on Tuesday.
He was one of the keynote speakers at the RSA conference here in San Francisco, where I happen to be.
And, you know, it's a typical Chertoff talk.
It wasn't pretty much any facts you could pull out.
And this is a conference of basically cybersecurity professionals and customers and product vendors.
So he's very much preaching to the business of cybersecurity.
And what he seems to be saying, there's some truth to some of the stuff he's saying, that there are serious cyber threats, both corporate and government.
The government needs to do a way better job at fixing them.
And he's going to devote resources to it.
So that sounds pretty good.
It's hard to argue with that.
We don't like it when IRS databases are exposed, or whether it's corporate credit card databases or FBI databases.
We don't like it when the Chinese government can hack into the DoD computers.
I mean, this is all pretty bad.
And he's saying we need to fix it.
There's no argument there.
How he's doing it is questionable.
You know, what kind of resources?
Where are they going?
And there's a lot of benefit to the government spending money here, because we all benefit.
And if the government spends money and fixes up an operating system.
So, for example, the NSA has released its version of Linux, which is the open source operating system.
They've gone into Linux, made security changes, and released the open source.
That is a phenomenal thing for the world.
Because now everybody can get the benefit.
Now, you know, you have to trust the NSA, but not really, because you can look at the source code.
I'm sure there's people pouring over right now.
I'm sorry?
I said I'm sure there's people pouring over looking for the flaws right now.
There are.
That's a good thing.
That's government resources.
There's an interesting effect in software, is that if I fix it, we all benefit.
So let's say, I'm going to make this up, the government lets a government-wide contract for a secure firewall.
And they have all these requirements.
And no firewall can meet it, because none of them are very good.
The companies improve their product, the government buys them, and now the company has a better product they sell to you and me.
Well, there's a danger there, too, which is that the government is always seeks, well, almost always seeks technology in terms of how better to spy on people, how better to wage war on people, and they push technology in ways that the free society probably would not have come up with, to the good and to the bad.
And there is some of that.
The Clipper chip in the last decade was an example where the government tried to put eavesdropping technology into secure phones.
So there is the worry that the government will add backdoors into products.
But again, you deal with that through information.
The Linux example, it's open source.
If the NSA tries to slip a backdoor in, it'll be found.
So there are ways to make this good.
And I know that the NSA is evaluating lots of products, and when they find security flaws, they go back and the company fixes them.
Company PGP makes hard drive encryption software and e-mail encryption software.
They're being evaluated right now by the British equivalent of the NSA.
And I've spoken to the researchers at the company, and they're getting all of these bug fixes.
Now, I use that product too, which means my product improves because the government of the UK is evaluating it.
I'm thrilled here.
Yeah.
Let me ask you about some of this data mining stuff.
The Talon program, right?
It was originally called Tips, and then they named it Talon.
Are these guys surfing through, downloading my e-mails and reading my instant messages?
Well, we don't know.
If they're not, they probably will soon.
And so what these programs are are sort of massive, massive data mining programs, collecting everything and looking for patterns.
I mean, I've written about it in essays on how this won't catch terrorists.
I mean, it's not the right solution for the problem.
But it is something that the NSA has been doing internationally for decades.
In the Cold War, the NSA's job was to suck down everything the Soviet Union ever did, put it in computers, and look for stuff.
So the technology is there, and it's getting easier and better.
The technology is also developed by companies.
So a lot of these really bad things are happening, companies like ChoicePoint or Axacom, who are doing this as a profit center.
So, you know, it's not just government.
There's a lot of corporate immorality and abuse here as well.
And the question is, what data are they collecting?
We seem to learn that the data the government cannot collect by law, they will buy from corporations who collect it.
And similarly, data government collects, driver's license data, they sell to corporations who use it.
So it's less the government and more this government-corporate partnership that makes this particularly onerous.
And a lot of data is collected.
We're pretty sure it includes not phone conversations, but the pen register, the lists of numbers you call, so your itemized phone bill.
So it would collect who you talk to and when and for how long.
Does it collect IM and instant messages?
We don't know.
We know the cell phone companies collect them.
If you remember a couple of years ago, Paris Hilton's cell phone was hacked.
And among the things published were her address book and a whole lot of SMS messages.
So those things are stored by the phone companies, whether they sell them, whether they give them to government, we don't know.
A lot of this is secret.
Credit card data most certainly is being sucked up.
Medical data, maybe.
We don't know.
I mean, this is the problem.
We just don't know.
Yeah, well, that is exactly the problem.
No accountability whatsoever if you don't even...
Does Congress even know?
In many cases, no.
And again, we don't know what Congress knows.
The layers of secrecy are myriad.
It seems like a lot of this is not done with congressional oversight.
Or perhaps it's done telling a few people.
If you think of the warrantless eavesdropping, supposedly a few congressmen were told and told they couldn't tell anybody.
So is that informing Congress?
Well, not really.
But, you know, sometimes some people find out.
But whenever we find out what the government's doing in terms of spying, or even what, you know, the big corporation's doing in terms of spying, it always ends up being more.
You know, it's never less than we think.
It's always more than we think.
Right, yeah.
No doubt about that.
All right.
Can you tell me a little bit about this book, Thinking Sensibly About Security in an Uncertain World?
So the book is called Beyond Fear.
What you just stated is the title.
I'm sorry.
You put it as a subtitle.
So the book is Beyond Fear.
And it's a lot of what we're talking about.
What I'm trying to do is to make people think differently about security.
And so I discuss security, large and small.
Personal security, corporate security, family security, national security.
I do a lot of stories about security in the animal and plant world, and sort of tease out ways to think about security that are more sensible, that are more rational, that are less fear-driven.
I mean, the title, Beyond Fear, is really trying to get beyond fear into rationality.
Because we're very much in this silly security season.
You know, people are making all sorts of bad security decisions.
And my hope in writing the book and my essays, and the essay you read that got me on this show, is to get people to think more rationally.
So that's Beyond Fear.
Yeah.
You could call it Everybody Calm Down a Minute.
That's right.
Calm down and let's think about what we're doing.
And don't scream national ID card.
Oh, yeah.
Oh, well.
I want to ask you about that.
But first, real quick, plant and animal examples of security.
Give me...
What are you talking about?
Well, I mean, the way I think of security, security is inherent to people, to humans.
And if you think about life, the first two things a life form figures out is how to eat and how to reproduce.
And the third thing is how to avoid predators.
So as human beings, a sort of highly evolved species, our notions of fear are incredibly deep in our brains.
And they first show up in single cellular organisms, moving away from predators.
And understanding the biological underpinnings of fear, understanding how different species react to security.
I mean, fight or flight.
You see the fight or flight reflex in primitive fishes.
And that's where it first shows up.
It's a piece of the brain called the amygdala.
We all have one.
But it first evolved in primitive fishes.
That's the part of the brain where that does the increased heart rate, the sweaty palms, focusing vision, increased muscle tension.
And what's interesting, you put people in brain scanners.
Maybe someone who's afraid of snakes.
And you show a picture of a snake.
And his amygdala reacts before his conscious brain sees the picture.
Wow.
Before it even sees the picture.
Right.
So you are fearful before you understand why you're afraid.
And so this is an extremely deep psychological reflex that in order to counter and if I want to make you not afraid of terrorists, of snakes, of whatever, there's a lot of work I have to do because I'm fighting a bunch of million years of evolution.
Wow.
Very interesting stuff.
Okay.
Now, real quick.
End of the show or end of this hour.
Real ID.
It's a done deal, right?
I know some states are trying to resist it.
But where are we at there?
You know, real ID seems not to be a done deal.
No?
It's a done deal in Congress.
Right?
It's been knocked through.
I mean, this is not democracy in action.
Representative Stenson Brenner from Wisconsin stuck it on a must-pass defense appropriations bill.
It passed without any debate even though everyone was against it because it had to.
And the states are fighting back.
UnrealID.com and also realnightmare.com are the two sites that track what the states are doing.
More states are saying no, we're not going to do it.
Montana is leading it.
I mean, the governor of Montana is very much a states' rights kind of guy.
He says, unfund the mandate, we're not doing it.
We're just not doing it.
You don't want us to do it?
Just no.
And it's hard to see how this will happen.
I mean, it seems to be dying.
There are bills in most states not to implement it.
And I don't think it's going to go through.
It's too expensive.
It doesn't do anything.
Wow.
Well, I sure hope that's right.
I guess I'm so pessimistic because they debuted that technology in 1995.
Now, some states might do some of the things by themselves.
Yeah.
But the federally mandated, I don't think it's going to happen.
Wow.
Well, that's great news.
What a great way to end the interview on an upbeat note there.
All right.
Thanks for having me.
Yeah, yeah.
Thank you very much for coming on the show, everybody.
Bruce Schneier, he's the Chief Technical Officer at BT Counterpain and is the author of Beyond Fear, Thinking Sensibly About Security
