Review of Liars and Outliers

Title: Liars and Outliers Author: Bruce Schneier Publisher: John Wiley & Sons Copyright: 2012 ISBN13: 978-1-118014330-8 Pages: 336 Price: $24.95 Rating: 91%

Liars and Outliers, Bruce Schneier's most recent security-related text, is an interesting and wide-ranging review of trust in commerce and broader society. And I do mean wide-ranging — he covers everything from the implications of early mankind's organization into groups of around 150 individuals (the "Dunbar number") to reputation systems such as eBay and Yelp reviews.Liars and Outliers doesn't hang together quite as well as his previous books, but it's still a terrific primer for readers who want more insights into the complex world of security and trust. I had the opportunity to speak with Dr. Schneier about his book. The text of the interview appears below. Why did you write Liars and Outliers? For me, writing is exploration. I initially set out to write a book about the human side of security, both the economics and psychology of security. More specifically, how we as a society use security to protect ourselves from individual members of society. It wasn't until I was most of the way through the book that I realized I was really writing about trust: that security was just the mechanism for society to induce trust. Why is thinking about trust important right now? We're living in an ever more complex, ever more technological world. The amount of trust we need in each other to survive as a society is enormous. Unless we explicitly think about trust -- why it is important, how we induce it, what we do about untrustworthy people within our society -- we risk getting security wrong, to the detriment of society. To give a specific example, international banking has the potential to collapse society, unless we ensure that those who need to be in positions of trust are indeed trustworthy. Every author has a core audience they expect to buy a book. Who are your core readers for Liars and Outliers? I wrote this book for a general audience. Liars and Outliers is not a computer book or even a technology book; it's more a current affairs book or a sociology book. And as such, my audience is anyone who is interested in the topic. Increasingly, when I write I don't have a specific type of reader in mind, just someone who is both intelligent and interested in the topics. Who should read your book, but probably won't? I would like more policymakers to read my book. I regularly get comments from readers who say they'll send the book to their legislator. Unfortunately, legislators -- at least in the U.S. -- generally have pretty rigid policy notions and not a lot of time for book-length reading. But I think my book would have a positive effect on a number of political debates -- not because it gives answers, but because it helps the reader to better understand the questions. Your position seems to be that we need a fairly strong central government to increase the cost of defection, both for criminal and civil matters. Are there areas in the US where we get this sort of regulation right? How about where we get it wrong, either by being too lax or too restrictive. Laws are an important part of achieving security and motivating trust. I don't have strong opinions on the type of government that should achieve those laws, though. In order to trust our food system, we need laws that make it illegal to lie about the food you sell, but whether those laws come from a democratically elected legislator or a benevolent despot don't matter. I certainly have opinions about effective and appropriate systems of government, but that's not the thrust of the book. In the U.S., we get regulation wrong all the time, often by having too little of it.  That is, without laws prohibiting certain behaviors, and effective punishments for those who breach those laws, the only things to prevent those behaviors are reputational effects. And it's too easy for organizations -- mostly large corporations -- to sidestep those reputational effects. The lax banking regulations that led to the financial meltdown of 2008 are an obvious example of that. Sometimes, though, we have too much regulation. Our nonsensical counterterrorism policy post-9/11 is an example of that. Often these regulatory failures occur because we've let our political ideology drive policy instead of doing what makes sense; or because technology has changed the balance between attacker and defender, and we haven't reacted fast enough. As for where we've gotten it right: violent crime in the U.S. is probably a good example. Does technology offer the prospect to deliver trust at a societal level? Technology enables trust to scale. For example, in the early days of banking, loan officers had to know the customers who received bank loans. Today, a perfect stranger can get a loan from a bank over the Internet. Why? Because the banks use an automatic system of credit scoring to determine who gets loans. That's a technology-driven trust mechanism. Society has lots of these, and they all help make trust scale. They're not perfect, of course; we've all heard stories of how credit scores didn't work for a particular individual or how the bank got screwed. But by and large the credit scoring system works. Right now, I'm in New York City, where there are 10 million people I don't know. Some of them want to take advantage of me in some way. That I can visit this city, safely -- without even thinking twice about it -- is a testament to how well technology enables trust to scale. On the other hand, technology can make trust harder. The bad guys can do more damage, from further away, at less risk to themselves, then ever before. So technology both giveth and taketh away.........

http://www.techsoc.com/liars.htm