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Bruce Schneier: It's Time For Technologists To Become Lawmakers (venturebeat.com)
Bruce Schneier, a well-known security guru, this week called on technologists to become lawmakers and policy makers so countries can deal with issues such as the governance of artificial intelligence and cybersecurity. From a report: "The future is coming," Schneier said, speaking at the RSA security conference in San Francisco. "It's coming faster than we think. And it's coming faster than our existing policy tools can deal with. And the only way to fix this is to develop a new set of policy tools. With the help of the technologists, you understand the technologies." The issues are a lot larger than just computer security. Schneier wants more public interest technologists in all areas.
[...] We saw the policy makers and technologies talk past each other when the FBI wanted Apple to break into an iPhone that belonged to a terrorist shooting suspect, Schneier said. The debate over Edward Snowden's disclosure of the National Security Agency's eavesdropping programs was another flash point. The need for policy makers to understand technology is clear. "This is no different than any other part of our complex world," he said. "We don't expect legislators to be experts in everything. We expect them to get and accept expertise. The second thing we need is for technologists to get involved in policy, and what we need is more public interest technologists" -- those who focus on social justice, the common good, and the public interest.
[...] We saw the policy makers and technologies talk past each other when the FBI wanted Apple to break into an iPhone that belonged to a terrorist shooting suspect, Schneier said. The debate over Edward Snowden's disclosure of the National Security Agency's eavesdropping programs was another flash point. The need for policy makers to understand technology is clear. "This is no different than any other part of our complex world," he said. "We don't expect legislators to be experts in everything. We expect them to get and accept expertise. The second thing we need is for technologists to get involved in policy, and what we need is more public interest technologists" -- those who focus on social justice, the common good, and the public interest.
The problem is everyone wants to be the problem solver and the leader.
Our current media shows the super hero leader, the guy who comes up with the creative solution, and then has the power and authority to pull it off.
A good leader isn't the problem solver, there is way too much on his plate, to sit down and work out a good solution to a problem. That is why they have specialists. Their job is to sit back, and work on a solution to the problem at hand and report it back to the leader. The Leaders job is to take a look at all the solutions, try to weigh their benefits and trade offs, pick the best solution and form a team of people who are able to implement this solution.
The best leaders are rarely the smartest guys in the room, and rarely have expertise in what they are leading. The best leaders know they are not the smartest people in the room, and do not pretend that they are. However they are involved, ask questions, challenge assumptions, and put their preconceived ideas aside, to fairly judge what is best.
FOSS project or projects maintained by technologist, have trained Problem solvers and specialists trying to lead a group of diverse people and idea's. And tend to go power mad, because they have their own solution in mind, and they have the power to enforce it. Often with the problem of ignoring better ideas.
This is also a problem with elected politics, we are so polarized on issues (solutions) that we do not vote in good leaders, but people who pretend to be these super hero "Leaders" like we see on TV. And when they get into power, they are stuck to follow the party line, because they were elected to do such.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
I'd rather have them join forces. Technologists could explain why laws can't work on a technical level, lawyers can explain why they won't work on a legal level and if they work together, there's a chance that the result is a law that DOES actually work on both levels.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I write software for a living, as many of us do, and I think this is a terrible idea.
Our first implementations are almost always buggy. They're also often blind to myriad scenarios that we disparagingly call "edge cases" (since we're usually unwilling to admit we didn't think it through enough). We all like doing iterative approaches where we tweak things to see what happens, and which things break. If something is not working perfectly, we tend to throw the whole thing out to start over from scratch. We can often obsess about a narrow range of things, while completely missing the larger picture.
That's not a good approach when dealing with human lives.
In my estimation, a good compromise would be a great politician who also has nerdy hobbies/interests. I'm thinking of someone who was able to program the VCR for his/her parents as a child/teenager. I want someone who understands the technology enough to use it well, and enough knowledge of the underlying principles to not view everything as magical black box.
Too many comments here miss the point of what Bruce says:
Regulation is coming!
If technologically savvy people do not get engaged then technologically illiterate people will make the rules.
You could become a politician, but you can also support lawyers, politicians and (the right) lobbyists.
But no matter what, regulation is coming!
The internet and technology play a bigger and bigger rule in our daily lives and that makes regulation inevitable.
I am sorry if this offends your belief in freedom, libertarianism, small government, or whatever. Where many people become engaged there need to be rules that govern those social and economic relationships.
Wasn't "bureaucracy" an achievement in Civilisation or some similar game? Letâ(TM)s create small and few rules.
Regulation is coming ! (thank you game of thrones)
question Bruce's logic here, since he's not exactly ignorant of either technology or law.
That happens once in a while. He's one of the foremost information security gurus in the world, but he still backs paper ballots as if they're magic. He won't even have a conversation about systemic problems in proving paper ballot integrity, in the lack of auditability of paper ballots, and so forth.
When such experts speak, people follow. That gets us HR1, the Black Box Voting Act, which threatens to cripple our democracy by expanding vote-by-mail not just to those with disabilities and other accessibility issues, but to everybody.
Imagine you go to vote. They use paper ballots.
You walk in, they have a box that was put there the previous night. It's black, sealed, and nobody can look inside. The box is also hidden behind a curtain.
You fill out a ballot, go behind the curtain, cast a vote.
Then they take the box out of the room and come back three weeks later with a different box filled with ballots that definitely came out of that box and haven't been altered. They count those.
That's vote-by-mail.
If 20% (a lot!) of votes by mail are tampered and 0.1% of votes are cast by mail, then 1 in 5,000 votes are tampered. If 50% of votes are cast by mail, that's 1 in 10. It matters.
Meanwhile, the paper ballots are the record, and they're transferred by a chain-of-custody, held in secure trust, etc.. If you open the ballots up to recount, whatever they say is the correct record.
That's not an audit trail. You don't have record of the contents of the ballot box; only that a ballot box with contents was handed off. We can duplicate or reverse seals readily enough.
To really provide an audit trail, you need data. Records that prove a set of ballots came from a particular polling center. Those records need to be produced in a manner in which the public can verify the election is not tamperable right up to the point of producing those records, and then can record those records themselves.
For plurality, you just use vote counts, as you can sum them; but plurality is hackable by adding candidates (strategic nomination).
For ranked ballots, the amount of data grows factorially with the number of candidates. It's impossible to prove ranked ballots without a computer involved. That means you need universal verifiability for electronic voting--this is a harder problem, but one I've explored; nothing today achieves this, although it's trivial to achieve.
HR1 of course outright prohibits the use of electronic records as an official count against the paper record. It doesn't make an exception when using systems of established universal verifiability.
So we've got a bill for establishing the tyranny of black box voting and insecure elections. Fucking great.
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