Quotes About Security

People often represent the weakest link in the security chain and are chronically responsible for the failure of security systems

We kill people based on metadata.

Data is the pollution problem of the information age, and protecting privacy is the environmental challenge.

One hundred years ago, everyone could have personal privacy. You and your friend could walk into an empty field, look around to see that no one else was nearby, and have a level of privacy that has forever been lost. As Whitfield Diffie has said: "No right of private conversation was enumerated in the Constitution. I don't suppose it occurred to anyone at the time that it could be prevented

The most common misconception about privacy is that it's about having something to hide. "If you aren't doing anything wrong, then you have nothing to hide," the saying goes, with the obvious implication that privacy only aids wrongdoers.

One of the most surreal aspects of the NSA stories based on the Snowden documents is how they made even the most paranoid conspiracy theorists seem like paragons of reason and common sense.

Complexity is the worst enemy of security, and our systems are getting more complex all the time.

Surveillance makes us feel like prey, just as it makes the surveillors act like predators.

In 2014, former NSA and CIA director Michael Hayden remarked, "We kill people based on metadata.

Privacy is an inherent human right, and a requirement for maintaining the human condition with dignity and respect.

Philosopher Jeremy Bentham conceived of his "panopticon" in the late 1700s as a way to build cheaper prisons. His idea was a prison where every inmate could be surveilled at any time, unawares. The inmate would have no choice but to assume that he was always being watched, and would therefore conform. This idea has been used as a metaphor for mass personal data collection, both on the Internet and off.

we tend to focus on rare and spectacular threats and ignore the more frequent and pedestrian ones. So we fear flying more than driving, even though the former is much safer. Or we fear terrorists more than the police, even though in the US you're nine times more likely to be killed by a police officer than by a terrorist.

Google knows more about what I'm thinking of than I do, because Google remembers all of it perfectly and forever.

For years, well before consumer tracking became the norm, Radio Shack stores would routinely ask their customers for their addresses and phone numbers. For a while I just refused, but that was socially awkward. Instead, I got in the habit of replying with "9800 Savage Road, Columbia, MD, 20755": the address of the NSA.

Those of us who fought the crypto wars, as we call them, thought we had won them in the 1990s. What the Snowden documents have shown us is that instead of dropping the notion of getting backdoor government access, the NSA and FBI just kept doing it in secret.

For many organizations, security comes down to basic economics. If the cost of security is less than the likely cost of losses due to lack of security, security wins. If the cost of security is more than the likely cost of losses, accept the losses.

I used to say that Google knows more about what I'm thinking of than my wife does. But that doesn't go far enough. Google knows more about what I'm thinking of than I do, because Google remembers all of it perfectly and forever.

If you ask amateurs to act as front-line security personnel, you shouldn't be surprised when you get amateur security.

Workforces are flexible, jobs are outsourced, and people are expendable. Moving from employer to employer is now the norm. This means that secrets are shared with more people, and those people care less about them. Recall that five million people in the US have a security clearance, and that a majority of them are contractors rather than government employees.

Embedded in digital photos is information such as the date, time, and location—yes, many cameras have GPS—of the photo's capture; generic information about the camera, lens, and settings; and an ID number of the camera itself. If you upload the photo to the web, that information often remains attached to the file.

Privacy is not a luxury that we can only afford in times of safety. Instead, it's a value to be preserved. It's essential for liberty, autonomy, and human dignity. We must understand that privacy is not something to be traded away in some fearful attempt to guarantee security, but something to maintain and protect in order to have real security. None of this will happen without a change of attitude. In the end, we'll get the privacy we as a society demand and not a bit more.

The world now knows that US telcos give the NSA access to the Internet backbone and that US cloud providers give it access to user accounts.

The most insidious RATs can turn your computer's camera on without turning the indicator light on. Not all ratters extort their victims; some just trade photos, videos, and files with each other.

Retail store surveillance systems register our presence, even if we are doing nothing but browsing and even if we pay for everything in cash.