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Liars and Outliers: Enabling the Trust That Society Needs to Thrive Hardcover – Illustrated, February 14, 2012
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- Print length384 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherJohn Wiley & Sons Inc
- Publication dateFebruary 14, 2012
- Dimensions6.5 x 1.25 x 9.25 inches
- ISBN-109781118143308
- ISBN-13978-1118143308
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Q&A with Bruce Schneier, Author of Liars and Outliers
Bruce Schneier, Author In your book, Liars and Outliers, you write, "Trust and cooperation are the first problems we had to solve before we could become a social species--but in the 21st century, they have become the most important problems we need to solve again." What do you mean by trust?
That is the right question to ask, since there are many different definitions of trust floating around. The trust I am writing about isn't personal, it's societal. By my definition, when we trust a person, an institution, or a system, we trust they will behave as we expect them to. It's more consistency or predictability than intimacy. And if you think about it, this is exactly the sort of trust our complex society runs on. I trust airline pilots, hotel clerks, ATMs, restaurant kitchens, and the company that built the computer I'm writing these answers on.
What makes people trustworthy?
That's the key question the book tackles. Most people are naturally trustworthy, but some are not. There are hotel clerks who will steal your credit card information. There are ATMs that have been hacked by criminals. Some restaurant kitchens serve tainted food. There was even an airline pilot who deliberately crashed his Boeing 767 into the Atlantic Ocean in 1999. Given that there are people who are naturally inclined to be untrustworthy, how does society keep their damage to a minimum? We use what I call societal pressures: morals and reputation are two, laws are another, and security systems are a fourth. Basically, it's all coercion. We coerce people into behaving in a trustworthy manner because society will fall apart if they don't.
You introduce the idea of defectors--those who don't follow "the rules." What are defectors?
One of the central metaphors of the book is the Prisoner's Dilemma, which sets up the conflict between the interests of a group and the interests of individuals within the group. Cooperating--or acting in a trustworthy manner--sometimes means putting group interest ahead of individual interest. Defecting means acting in one's self-interest as opposed to the group interest. To put it in concrete terms: we are collectively better off if no one steals, but I am individually better off if I steal other people's stuff. But if everyone did that, society would collapse. So we need societal pressures to induce cooperation--to prevent people from stealing.
There are two basic types of defectors. In this example, the first are people who know stealing is wrong, but steal anyway. The second are people who believe that, in some circumstances, stealing is right. Think of Robin Hood, who stole from the rich and gave to the poor. Or Jean Valjean from Les Miserables, who stole to feed his starving family.
Why are some defectors good for society?
Cooperators are people who follow the formal or informal rules of society. Defectors are people who, for whatever reason, break the rules. That definition says nothing about the absolute morality of the society or its rules. When society is in the wrong, it's defectors who are in the vanguard for change. So it was defectors who helped escaped slaves in the antebellum American South. It's defectors who are agitating to overthrow repressive regimes in the Middle East. And it's defectors who are fueling the Occupy Wall Street movement. Without defectors, society stagnates.
What major news stories of the past decade were triggered by failed trust? How can we prevent these failures in the future?
The story I had in most in mind while writing the book was the global financial crisis of a few years ago, where a handful of people cheated the system to their own advantage. Those were particularly newsworthy defectors; but if you start looking, you can see defectors and the effects of their defection everywhere: in corrupt politicians, special interests subverting the tax system, file sharers downloading music and movies without paying for them, and so on. The key characteristic is a situation where the group interest is in opposition to someone's self-interest, and people have been permitted to follow their own self-interest to the greater harm of the group.
What makes Liars and Outliers so relevant in today's society?
As our systems--whether social systems like Facebook or political systems like Congress--get more complex, the destructive potential of defectors becomes greater. To use another term from the book, the scope of defection increases with more technology. This means that the societal pressures we traditionally put in place to limit defections no longer work, and we need to rethink security. It's easy to see this in terms of terrorism: one of the reasons terrorists are so scary today is that they can do more damage to society than the terrorists of 20 years ago could--and future technological developments will make the terrorists of 20 years from now scarier still.
What do you hope readers will take away from reading Liars and Outliers?
I can do no better than quote from the first chapter: "This book represents my attempt to develop a full-fledged theory of coercion and how it enables compliance and trust within groups. My goal is to rephrase some of those questions and provide a new framework for analysis. I offer new perspectives, and a broader spectrum of what's possible. Perspectives frame thinking, and sometimes asking new questions is the catalyst to greater understanding. It’s my hope that this book can give people an illuminating new framework with which to help understand the world."
Review
"This book will appeal not only to customers interested in computer security but also on the idea of security and trust as a whole in society." (The Bookseller, 16th December 2011)
"This book should be read by anyone in a leadership role, whether they're in the corporate or political sphere... an easy read and the ideas and thoughts are profound." (Naked Security, February 2012)
"By concentrating on the human angle and packing the book with real world examples he has successfully stretched its appeal outside that of the security specialist to the more general reader." (E & T Magazine, March 2012)
Review
ADVANCE PRAISE FOR LIARS AND OUTLIERS
"A rich, insightfully fresh take on what security really means!"
―DAVID ROPEIK, Author of How Risky is it, Really?
"Schneier has accomplished a spectacular tour de force: an enthralling ride through history, economics, and psychology, searching for the meanings of trust and security. A must read."
―ALESSANDRO ACQUISTI, Associate Professor of Information Systems and Public Policy at the Heinz College, Carnegie Mellon University
"Liars and Outliers offers a major contribution to the understandability of these issues, and has the potential to help readers cope with the ever-increasing risks to which we are being exposed. It is well written and delightful to read."
―PETER G. NEUMANN, Principal Scientist in the SRI International Computer Science Laboratory
"Whether it's banks versus robbers, Hollywood versus downloaders, or even the Iranian secret police against democracy activists, security is often a dynamic struggle between a majority who want to impose their will, and a minority who want to push the boundaries. Liars and Outliers will change how you think about conflict, our security, and even who we are."
―ROSS ANDERSON, Professor of Security Engineering at Cambridge University and author of Security Engineering
"Readers of Bruce Schneier's Liars and Outliers will better understand technology and its consequences and become more mature practitioners."
―PABLO G. MOLINA, Professor of Technology Management, Georgetown University
"Liars & Outliers is not just a book about security―it is the book about it. Schneier shows that the power of humour can be harnessed to explore even a serious subject such as security. A great read!"
―FRANK FUREDI, author of On Tolerance: A Defence of Moral Independence
"This fascinating book gives an insightful and convincing framework for understanding security and trust."
―JEFF YAN, Founding Research Director, Center for Cybercrime and Computer Security, Newcastle University
"By analyzing the moving parts and interrelationships among security, trust, and society, Schneier has identifi ed critical patterns, pressures, levers, and security holes within society. Clearly written, thoroughly interdisciplinary, and always smart, Liars and Outliers provides great insight into resolving society's various dilemmas."
―JERRY KANG, Professor of Law, UCLA
"By keeping the social dimension of trust and security in the center of his analysis, Schneier breaks new ground with an approach that both theoretically grounded and practically applicable."
―JONATHAN ZITTRAIN, Professor of Law and Computer Science, Harvard University and author of The Future of the Internet―And How to Stop It
"Eye opening. Bruce Schneier provides a perspective you need to understand today’s world."
―STEVEN A. LEBLANC, Director of Collections, Harvard University and author of Constant Battles: Why We Fight
"An outstanding investigation of the importance of trust in holding society together and promoting progress. Liars and Outliers provides valuable new insights into security and economics."
―ANDREW ODLYZKO, Professor, School of Mathematics, University of Minnesota
"What Schneier has to say about trust―and betrayal―lays a groundwork for greater understanding of human institutions. This is an essential exploration as society grows in size and complexity."
―JIM HARPER, Director of Information Policy Studies, CATO Institute and author of Identity Crisis: How Identification is Overused and Misunderstood
"Society runs on trust. Liars and Outliers explains the trust gaps we must fill to help society run even better."
―M. ERIC JOHNSON, Director, Glassmeyer/McNamee Center for Digital Strategies, Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College
"An intellectually exhilarating and compulsively readable analysis of the subtle dialectic between cooperation and defection in human society. Intellectually rigorous and yet written in a lively, conversational style, Liars and Outliers will change the way you see the world."
―DAVID LIVINGSTONE SMITH, author of Less Than Human: Why We Demean, Enslave, and Exterminate Others
"Schneier tackles trust head on, bringing all his intellect and a huge amount of research to bear. The best thing about this book, though, is that it's great fun to read."
―ANDREW MCAFEE, Principal Research Scientist, MIT Center for Digital Business and co-author of Race Against the Machine
"Bruce Schneier is our leading expert in security. But his book is about much more than reducing risk. It is a fascinating, thought-provoking treatise about humanity and society and how we interact in the game called life."
―JEFF JARVIS, author of Public Parts: How Sharing in the Digital Age Improves the Way We Work and Live
"Both accessible and thought provoking, Liars and Outliers invites readers to move beyond fears and anxieties about security in modern life to understand the role of everyday people in creating a healthy society. This is a must-read!"
―DANAH BOYD, Research Assistant Professor in Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University
"Trust is the sine qua non of the networked age and trust is predicated on security. Bruce Schneier’s expansive and readable work is rich with insights that can help us make our shrinking world a better one."
―DON TAPSCOTT, co-author of Macrowikinomics: Rebooting Business
and the World
"An engaging and wide-ranging rumination on what makes society click. Highly recommended."
―JOHN MUELLER, author of Overblown: How Politicians and the Terrorism Industry Inflate National Security Threats, and Why We Believe Them
From the Inside Flap
Trust and cooperation are the first problems we had to solve before we could become a social species. In the 21st century, they have become the most important problems we need to solve again. Our global society has become so large and complex that our traditional trust mechanisms no longer work.
Bruce Schneier, world-renowned for his level-headed thinking on security and technology, tackles this complex subject head-on. Society can't function without trust, and yet must function even when people are untrustworthy.
Liars and Outliers reaches across academic disciplines to develop an understanding of trust, cooperation, and social stability. From the subtle social cues we use to recognize trustworthy people to the laws that punish the noncompliant, from the way our brains reward our honesty to the bank vaults that keep out the dishonest, keeping people cooperative is a delicate balance of rewards and punishments. It's a series of evolutionary tricks, social pressures, legal mechanisms, and physical barriers.
In the absence of personal relationships, we have no choice but to substitute security for trust, compliance for trustworthiness. This progression has enabled society to scale to unprecedented complexity, but has also permitted massive global failures.
At the same time, too much cooperation is bad. Without some level of rule-breaking, innovation and social progress become impossible. Society stagnates.
Today's problems require new thinking, and Liars and Outliers provides that. It is essential that we learn to think clearly about trust. Our future depends on it.
From the Back Cover
How does society function when you can't trust everyone?
When we think about trust - we naturally think about personal relationships or bank accounts. But that is much too narrow; trust is broader, and far more important. Nothing in society works without trust. It is the foundation of communities, commerce, democracy, and world stability.
In this insightful and entertaining book, Schneier weaves together ideas from across the social and biological sciences to explore how societies induce and encourage trust'and what happens when it fails in our personal lives, our businesses, communities, and the world.
In today's hyper-connected society, understanding the mechanisms of trust is as important as understanding electricity was a century ago. Issues of trust and security are critical to solving problems as diverse as corporate responsibility, global warming, and stagnant political systems. After reading Liars and Outliers, you'll think about social problems, large and small, with a new perspective.
"Schneier makes an original and powerful argument for rethinking society. . . . His message is full of insight into how we function, or don't function, and along the way we are constantly hearing from the giants'such as Emerson, Thoreau, Socrates, even Emily Dickinson."
'Seymour M. Hersh, New Yorker
"Deeply philosophical yet highly accessible, Liars and Outliers is more than thought-provoking'it's the kind of book that fundamentally changes the way you think."
'Daniel J. Solove, John Marshall Harlan Research Professor of Law, George Washington University Law School
"Brilliantly dissects, classifies, and orders the social dimension of security'a spectacularly palatable tonic against today's incoherent and dangerous flailing in the face of threats from terrorism to financial fraud."
'Cory Doctorow, Author of Little Brother and Makers; co-editor of BoingBoing.net
"Engaging, insightful, and thought-provoking, Liars and Outliers will alter how you think about trust and security."
'Dorothy Denning, Distinguished Professor of Defense Analysis, Naval Postgraduate School, and author of Information Warfare and Security
"Without trust, nothing can be achieved. Liars and Outliers is a brilliant analysis of the role of trust in society and business."
'Claus Schwab, Founder and Executive Chairman, World Economic Forum
A note for e-book readers: For ease of reference, the figures used in this book are also located at www.schneier.com/lo.
About the Author
BRUCE SCHNEIER is an internationally renowned security technologist who studies the human side of security. A prolific author, he has written hundreds of articles, essays, and academic papers, as well as eleven books that together have sold more than 400,000 copies. He has testified before Congress, is a frequent guest on television and radio, and is regularly quoted in the press. His blog and monthly newsletter at www.schneier.com reach over 250,000 devoted readers worldwide.
BRUCE SCHNEIER is an internationally renowned security technologist who studies the human side of security. A prolific author, he has written hundreds of articles, essays, and academic papers, as well as eleven books that together have sold more than 400,000 copies. He has testified before Congress, is a frequent guest on television and radio, and is regularly quoted in the press. His blog and monthly newsletter at www.schneier.com reach over 250,000 devoted readers worldwide.
"The closest thing the security industry has to a rock star."
'The Register
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Liars and Outliers
Enabling the Trust that Society Needs to ThriveBy Bruce SchneierJohn Wiley & Sons
Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, LtdAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-1181-4330-8
Chapter One
OverviewJust today, a stranger came to my door claiming he was here to unclog a bathroom drain. I let him into my house without verifying his identity, and not only did he repair the drain, he also took off his shoes so he wouldn't track mud on my floors. When he was done, I gave him a piece of paper that asked my bank to give him some money. He accepted it without a second glance. At no point did he attempt to take my possessions, and at no point did I attempt the same of him. In fact, neither of us worried that the other would. My wife was also home, but it never occurred to me that he was a sexual rival and I should therefore kill him.
Also today, I passed several strangers on the street without any of them attacking me. I bought food from a grocery store, not at all concerned that it might be unfit for human consumption. I locked my front door, but didn't spare a moment's worry at how easy it would be for someone to smash my window in. Even people driving cars, large murderous instruments that could crush me like a bug, didn't scare me.
Most amazingly, this worked without much overt security. I don't carry a gun for self-defense, nor do I wear body armor. I don't use a home burglar alarm. I don't test my food for poison. I don't even engage in conspicuous displays of physical prowess to intimidate other people I encounter.
It's what we call "trust." Actually, it's what we call "civilization."
All complex ecosystems, whether they are biological ecosystems like the human body, natural ecosystems like a rain forest, social ecosystems like an open-air market, or socio-technical ecosystems like the global financial system or the Internet, are deeply interlinked. Individual units within those ecosystems are interdependent, each doing its part and relying on the other units to do their parts as well. This is neither rare nor difficult, and complex ecosystems abound.
At the same time, all complex ecosystems contain parasites. Within every interdependent system, there are individuals who try to subvert the system to their own ends. These could be tapeworms in our digestive tracts, thieves in a bazaar, robbers disguised as plumbers, spammers on the Internet, or companies that move their profits offshore to evade taxes.
Within complex systems, there is a fundamental tension between what I'm going to call cooperating, or acting in the group interest; and what I'll call defecting, or acting against the group interest and instead in one's own self-interest. Political philosophers have recognized this antinomy since Plato. We might individually want each other's stuff, but we're collectively better off if everyone respects property rights and no one steals. We might individually want to reap the benefits of government without having to pay for them, but we're collectively better off if everyone pays taxes. Every country might want to be able to do whatever it wants, but the world is better off with international agreements, treaties, and organizations. In general, we're collectively better off if society limits individual behavior, and we'd each be better off if those limits didn't apply to us individually. That doesn't work, of course, and most of us recognize this. Most of the time, we realize that it is in our self-interest to act in the group interest. But because parasites will always exist—because some of us steal, don't pay our taxes, ignore international agreements, or ignore limits on our behavior—we also need security.
Society runs on trust. We all need to trust that the random people we interact with will cooperate. Not trust completely, not trust blindly, but be reasonably sure (whatever that means) that our trust is well-founded and they will be trustworthy in return (whatever that means). This is vital. If the number of parasites gets too large, if too many people steal or too many people don't pay their taxes, society no longer works. It doesn't work both because there is so much theft that people can't be secure in their property, and because even the honest become suspicious of everyone else. More importantly, it doesn't work because the social contract breaks down: society is no longer seen as providing the required benefits. Trust is largely habit, and when there's not enough trust to be had, people stop trusting each other.
The devil is in the details. In all societies, for example, there are instances where property is legitimately taken from one person and given to another: taxes, fines, fees, confiscation of contraband, theft by a legitimate but despised ruler, etc. And a societal norm like "everyone pays his or her taxes" is distinct from any discussion about what sort of tax code is fair. But while we might disagree about the extent of the norms we subject ourselves to—that's what politics is all about—we're collectively better off if we all follow them.
Of course, it's actually more complicated than that. A person might decide to break the norms, not for selfish parasitical reasons, but because his moral compass tells him to. He might help escaped slaves flee into Canada because slavery is wrong. He might refuse to pay taxes because he disagrees with what his government is spending his money on. He might help laboratory animals escape because he believes animal testing is wrong. He might shoot a doctor who performs abortions because he believes abortion is wrong. And so on.
Sometimes we decide a norm breaker did the right thing. Sometimes we decide that he did the wrong thing. Sometimes there's consensus, and sometimes we disagree. And sometimes those who dare to defy the group norm become catalysts for social change. Norm breakers rioted against the police raids of the Stonewall Inn in New York in 1969, at the beginning of the gay rights movement. Norm breakers hid and saved the lives of Jews in World War II Europe, organized the Civil Rights bus protests in the American South, and assembled in unlawful protest at Tiananmen Square. When the group norm is later deemed immoral, history may call those who refused to follow it heroes.
In 2008, the U.S. real estate industry collapsed, almost taking the global economy with it. The causes of the disaster are complex, but were in a large part caused by financial institutions and their employees subverting financial systems to their own ends. They wrote mortgages to homeowners who couldn't afford them, and then repackaged and resold those mortgages in ways that intentionally hid real risk. Financial analysts, who made money rating these bonds, gave them high ratings to ensure repeat rating business.
This is an example of a failure of trust: a limited number of people were able to use the global financial system for their own personal gain. That sort of thing isn't supposed to happen. But it did happen. And it will happen again if society doesn't get better at both trust and security.
Failures in trust have become global problems:
• The Internet brings amazing benefits to those who have access to it, but it also brings with it new forms of fraud. Impersonation fraud—now called identity theft—is both easier and more profitable than it was pre-Internet. Spam continues to undermine the usability of e-mail. Social networking sites deliberately make it hard for people to effectively manage their own privacy. And antagonistic behavior threatens almost every Internet community.
• Globalization has improved the lives of people in many countries, but with it came an increased threat of global terrorism. The terrorist attacks of 9/11 were a failure of trust, and so were the government overreactions in the decade following.
• The financial network allows anyone to do business with anyone else around the world; but easily hacked financial accounts mean there is enormous profit in fraudulent transactions, and easily hacked computer databases mean there is also a global market in (terrifyingly cheap) stolen credit card numbers and personal dossiers to enable those fraudulent transactions.
• Goods and services are now supplied worldwide at much lower cost, but with this change comes tainted foods, unsafe children's toys, and the outsourcing of data processing to countries with different laws.
• Global production also means more production, but with it comes environmental pollution. If a company discharges lead into the atmosphere— or chlorofluorocarbons, or nitrogen oxides, or carbon dioxide—that company gets all the benefit of cheaper production costs, but the environmental cost falls on everybody else on the planet.
And it's not just global problems, of course. Narrower failures in trust are so numerous as to defy listing. Here are just a few examples:
• In 2009–2010, officials of Bell, California, effectively looted the city's treasury, awarding themselves unusually high salaries, often for part-time work.
• Some early online games, such as Star Wars Galaxy Quest, collapsed due to internal cheating.
• The senior executives at companies such as WorldCom, Enron, and Adelphia inflated their companies' stock prices through fraudulent accounting practices, awarding themselves huge bonuses but destroying the companies in the process.
What ties all these examples together is that the interest of society was in conflict with the interests of certain individuals within society. Society had some normative behaviors, but failed to ensure that enough people cooperated and followed those behaviors. Instead, the defectors within the group became too large or too powerful or too successful, and ruined it for everyone.
* * *
This book is about trust. Specifically, it's about trust within a group. It's important that defectors not take advantage of the group, but it's also important for everyone in the group to trust that defectors won't take advantage.
"Trust" is a complex concept, and has a lot of flavors of meaning. Sociologist Piotr Sztompka wrote that "trust is a bet about the future contingent actions of others." Political science professor Russell Hardin wrote: "Trust involves giving discretion to another to affect one's interests." These definitions focus on trust between individuals and, by extension, their trustworthiness.
When we trust people, we can either trust their intentions or their actions. The first is more intimate. When we say we trust a friend, that trust isn't tied to any particular thing he's doing. It's a general reliance that, whatever the situation, he'll do the right thing: that he's trustworthy. We trust the friend's intentions, and know that his actions will be informed by those intentions.
The second is less intimate, what sociologist Susan Shapiro calls impersonal trust. When we don't know someone, we don't know enough about her, or her underlying motivations, to trust her based on character alone. But we can trust her future actions. We can trust that she won't run red lights, or steal from us, or cheat on tests. We don't know if she has a secret desire to run red lights or take our money, and we really don't care if she does. Rather, we know that she is likely to follow most social norms of acceptable behavior because the consequences of breaking these norms are high. You can think of this kind of trust— that people will behave in a trustworthy manner even if they are not inherently trustworthy—more as confidence, and the corresponding trustworthiness as compliance.
In another sense, we're reducing trust to consistency or predictability. Of course, someone who is consistent isn't necessarily trustworthy. If someone is a habitual thief, I don't trust him. But I do believe (and, in another sense of the word, trust) that he will try to steal from me. I'm less interested in that aspect of trust, and more in the positive aspects. In The Naked Corporation, business strategist Don Tapscott described trust, at least in business, as the expectation that the other party will be honest, considerate, accountable, and transparent. When two people are consistent in this way, we call them cooperative.
In today's complex society, we often trust systems more than people. It's not so much that I trusted the plumber at my door as that I trusted the systems that produced him and protect me. I trusted the recommendation from my insurance company, the legal system that would protect me if he did rob my house, whatever the educational system is that produces and whatever insurance system bonds skilled plumbers, and—most of all—the general societal systems that inform how we all treat each other in society. Similarly, I trusted the banking system, the corporate system, the system of police, the system of traffic laws, and the system of social norms that govern most behaviors.
This book is about trust more in terms of groups than individuals. I'm not really concerned about how specific people come to trust other specific people. I don't care if my plumber trusts me enough to take my check, or if I trust that driver over there enough to cross the street at the stop sign. I'm concerned with the general level of impersonal trust in society. Francis Fukuyama's definition nicely captures the term as I want to use it: "Trust is the expectation that arises within a community of regular, honest, and cooperative behavior, based on commonly shared norms, on the part of other members of that community."
Sociologist Barbara Misztal identified three critical functions performed by trust: 1) it makes social life more predictable, 2) it creates a sense of community, and 3) it makes it easier for people to work together. In some ways, trust in society works like oxygen in the atmosphere. The more customers trust merchants, the easier commerce is. The more drivers trust other drivers, the smoother traffic flows. Trust gives people the confidence to deal with strangers: because they know that the strangers are likely to behave honestly, cooperatively, fairly, and sometimes even altruistically. The more trust is in the air, the healthier society is and the more it can thrive. Conversely, the less trust is in the air, the sicker society is and the more it has to contract. And if the amount of trust gets too low, society withers and dies. A recent example of a systemic breakdown in trust occurred in the Soviet Union under Stalin.
I'm necessarily simplifying here. Trust is relative, fluid, and multidimensional. I trust Alice to return a $10 loan but not a $10,000 loan, Bob to return a $10,000 loan but not to babysit an infant, Carol to babysit but not with my house key, Dave with my house key but not my intimate secrets, and Ellen with my intimate secrets but not to return a $10 loan. I trust Frank if a friend vouches for him, a taxi driver as long as he's displaying his license, and Gail as long as she hasn't been drinking. I don't trust anyone at all with my computer password. I trust my brakes to stop the car, ATM machines to dispense money from my account, and Angie's List to recommend a qualified plumber—even though I have no idea who designed, built, or maintained those systems. Or even who Angie is. In the language of this book, we all need to trust each other to follow the behavioral norms of our group.
Many other books talk about the value of trust to society. This book explains how society establishes and maintains that trust. Specifically, it explains how society enforces, evokes, elicits, compels, encourages—I'll use the term induces— trustworthiness, or at least compliance, through systems of what I call societal pressures, similar to sociology's social controls: coercive mechanisms that induce people to cooperate, act in the group interest, and follow group norms. Like physical pressures, they don't work in all cases on all people. But again, whether the pressures work against a particular person is less important than whether they keep the scope of defection to a manageable level across society as a whole.
A manageable level, but not too low a level. Compliance isn't always good, and defection isn't always bad. Sometimes the group norm doesn't deserve to be followed, and certain kinds of progress and innovation require violating trust. In a police state, everybody is compliant but no one trusts anybody. A too-compliant society is a stagnant society, and defection contains the seeds of social change.
This book is also about security. Security is a type of a societal pressure in that it induces cooperation, but it's different from the others. It is the only pressure that can act as a physical constraint on behavior regardless of how trustworthy people are. And it is the only pressure that individuals can implement by themselves. In many ways, it obviates the need for intimate trust. In another way, it is how we ultimately induce compliance and, by extension, trust.
It is essential that we learn to think smartly about trust. Philosopher Sissela Bok wrote: "Whatever matters to human beings, trust is the atmosphere in which it thrives." People, communities, corporations, markets, politics: everything. If we can figure out the optimal societal pressures to induce cooperation, we can reduce murder, terrorism, bank fraud, industrial pollution, and all the rest.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Liars and Outliersby Bruce Schneier Copyright © 2012 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Excerpted by permission of John Wiley & Sons. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Product details
- ASIN : 1118143302
- Publisher : John Wiley & Sons Inc; Illustrated edition (February 14, 2012)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 384 pages
- ISBN-10 : 9781118143308
- ISBN-13 : 978-1118143308
- Item Weight : 1.4 pounds
- Dimensions : 6.5 x 1.25 x 9.25 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #1,050,657 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #924 in Business Ethics (Books)
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Liars and Outliers
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About the author
Bruce Schneier is an internationally renowned security technologist, called a "security guru" by The Economist. He is the author of 12 books -- including "Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World" -- as well as hundreds of articles, essays, and academic papers. His influential newsletter "Crypto-Gram" and blog "Schneier on Security" are read by over 250,000 people. Schneier is a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School, a program fellow at the New America Foundation's Open Technology Institute, a board member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and an Advisory Board member of the Electronic Privacy Information Center. He is also the Chief Technology Officer of Resilient Systems, Inc.
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First, it's immensely readable and filled with an incredible amount of information about how societies evolved and work (and why not).
More importantly, however, Bruce has identified what is probably the most important issue facing all of us today. Trust. Without trust, society doesn't work. But look around: we don't trust the government, we don't trust big business, and we don't trust banks or anyone on Wall Street. (There's a much longer list, but you get the idea.)
Our existing models of trust and mechanisms for dealing with defectors don't scale to either the size of the Internet or the flood of information that's so readily available. Once upon a time, perhaps in a fairy tale, we actually knew our elected representatives, and they counted on us to fund their election campaigns. Now it's PACs and SuperPACs and we're irrelevant. If your elected representative parties a bit too much while away from home, or too obviously is influenced by the hordes of lobbyists, or actually admits their ignorance in a committee meeting, you'll know about it instantly. Once upon a time, we were "protected" from that knowledge because it simply didn't deserve space in the newspaper and wasn't entertaining enough to for the local TV news. Otto von Bismarck observed that "laws are like sausages; it's better not to see them made." That sentiment also applies to lawmakers.
In that same fairy tale, you worked your entire life for one company, then took your gold watch and retired to a life of leisure, supported by a retirement fund almost wholly funded by your employer. That is, unless your employer repaid your loyalty by "riffing" you or was so ineptly managed that the company eventually went bankrupt, taking your retirement income with it. Or perhaps you worked your entire life for a local government that "promised" generous pension benefits and lifetime healthcare. Unfortunately, the people who made those promises were never required to figure out how to pay for them, and the day of reckoning is now very near.
And then there's the marvelous fantasy about how the equity in your home will eventually fund your move to a tropical island. The folks on Wall Street have already spent your home equity on yachts and ski chalets and putting their kids through expensive colleges.
I'd sure like to see the Presidential candidates debate this topic. Unfortunately, none of them would be the least bit credible.
Read Bruce's book to find out whether our society can survive.
This innovative systems perspective of trust as it relates to security in general represents a profound breakthrough which should have considerable influence on discussions and debate within the security community. The detailed analysis of how pressures, incentives, and penalties influence individuals and organizations is extremely useful for understanding potential and probable results of various policy and control initiatives.
Schneier also provides an excellent explanation for why criminal organizations are inherently more agile and adaptable than business and law enforcement agencies. This inherent agility is very apparent in computer and network security where the pace of new exploits and attack vectors at times seems to overwhelm traditional defense mechanisms.
The conclusions drawn in this book describe the importance of trust and how it will not diminish over time in the future. Schneier deftly summarizes how the trust framework must be well understood when designing and implementing societal pressures and how "perfect security" is an absolute illusion. While no specific policy recommendations are offered, this book should provide foundational knowledge for fueling effective and informed debate in the security arena.
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Je ne peux qu'inciter à suivre son blog (ou sa newsletter, même contenu): c'est une perle d'anecdotes, de mise mise en perspective, et de bon sens. En cherchant des solutions de sécurité informatique, Schneier nous conduit à analyser notre comportement en tant qu'individu et membres de groupes. Pour celles et ceux qui veulent penser plus loin que le bout de leur clavier.
This book is divided in four parts. In the first part Schneier brings the reader up to par with the current state of the 'science of trust', as he calls it. In these chapters he talks about the way human beings and some animals cooperate, how cooperation developed in their respective species, what altruism is, and what a society is. This first section of the book ends with an interesting set of societal dilemmas and - most importantly - a framework by which each of these dilemmas can be understood. In this framework Schneier puts the societal (or group) interest over against the interest of the party (or person) that wants to defect.
Part two of the book presents four pressures influencing every societal dilemma, namely societal, moral, reputational and institutional. Each one of these parts of this model of trust is described in detail and explained through examples. This part of the book ends with an overview of the topic of security and how it relates towards these pressures. In this chapter, Schneier shows once again how good and well-balanced security is necessary to counterbalance the different forms of trust. He also describes how security influences each of the four pressures.
The first two parts of the book are quite theoretical and systemic, but legible and understandable nevertheless. In the third section Schneier takes his models into the real world, to see how they fit in. He does so from the perspective of competing interests within organizations (each group of people), corporations (different from individual people because they're no people with personal interests), and institutions (governmental groups, with their particular interests). What has kept with me after reading these chapters is that each 'society' has its own interests and that these interests do not always fit in with the interests of others. I believe that dissecting societal dilemmas through Schneier's model of trust really helps to gain a fuller understanding of the weight and content of the forces at work.
The fourth and final part of the book contains three chapters with conclusions. For some part, these chapters are a repetition of the previous chapters. They contain, however, a kind of counterbalance to the well-reasoned and rational model of trust Schneier presented, because of the concept of the human psychology that sometimes gives us the desire to do things that are not so reasonable. Moreover, he describes some of the technological advances that have been made and will be made, and - more importantly - how both cooperators and defectors make use of technology. This section also holds a fiery speech in favor of well-reasoned, community-based, transparant, and general forms of security technology.
In his last chapter Schneier once again makes sure that we understand that security is not something do once and then forget, it's a process that needs to be readjusted all the time. It's also important to keep in mind that society both needs cooperators and defectors (or outliers), since the latter group is able to foster innovation, that can be used to improve society for all of us.
Auf dem Umschlag das Zitat zur Person: "Das, was in der Security-Industrie einem Rockstar am nächsten kommt." Das spiegelt sowohl die positiven als auch die negativen Aspekte dieses Buchs wieder. Als Rockstar kommt er überall an - das Buch ist lesbar, sehr verständlich und gut strukturiert. Das erreicht er aber, wie bei seinen vorherigen Publikationen auch, durch sehr ausführliche Schilderungen und teilweise ermüdende Wiederholungen. Meiner Meinung nach wäre das Thema passender in einem konzisen 50 Seiten-Papier abgehandelt worden als in Buchform.
Dennoch, die Darstellung des Vertrauensproblems, die von Schneier vorgenommene Strukturierung desselben und die Einbeziehung diverser, teilweise unvorhergesehener Rahmenparameter machen das Buch erwartungsgemäss lesenswert - wie immer bei Schneier: eine interessante Sicht auf die Dinge. Wobei dem potentiellen Leser klar sein muss: das Buch ist eher analytischer Natur als dass es Lösungen aufzeigt, und das ist dem Thema auch angemessen. Auch das eine Kernaussage des Buches: ohne umfassendes Problemverständnis muss jeder Lösungsansatz scheitern; und dieses Buch agiert eindeutig auf der Problemverständnis-Seite.
Ein Stern Abzug wegen der erwähnten Überlänge und Wiederholung - dennoch inhaltlich top und klare Kaufempfehlung.