Bruce Schneier

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Bruce Schneier (born January 15, 1963) is an American cryptographer, computer security specialist, and writer.

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  • It is poor civic hygiene to install technologies that could someday facilitate a police state.
    • Secrets and Lies (2000), p. 53
  • Digital files cannot be made uncopyable, any more than water can be made not wet.
  • More people are killed every year by pigs than by sharks, which shows you how good we are at evaluating risk.


  • When my mother gets a prompt 'Do you want to download this?' she's going to say yes. It's disingenuous for Microsoft to give you all of these tools [in Internet Explorer] with which to hang yourself, and when you do, then say it's your fault.
  • Chaos is hard to create, even on the Internet. Here's an example. Go to Amazon.com. Buy a book without using SSL. Watch the total lack of chaos.
  • ... if anyone thinks they can get an accurate picture of anyplace on the planet by reading news reports, they're sadly mistaken.
  • We can't keep weapons out of prisons; we can't possibly expect to keep them out of airports.
    • Schneier, Bruce (2005-05-15). Prison Shivs. Cryptogram newsletter. Retrieved on 2009-12-27.
  • Technical problems can be remediated. A dishonest corporate culture is much harder to fix.
  • Beware the Four Horsemen of the Information Apocalypse: terrorists, drug dealers, kidnappers, and child pornographers. Seems like you can scare any public into allowing the government to do anything with those four.
    • Schneier, Bruce (2005-12-16). Computer Crime Hype. Schneier on Security blog. Retrieved on 2006-09-08.
  • I mean, the computer industry promises nothing. Did you ever read a shrink-wrapped license agreement? You should read one. It basically says, if this product deliberately kills your children, and we knew it would, and we decided not to tell you because it might harm sales, we're not liable. I mean, it says stuff like that. They're absurd documents. You have no rights.
    • "Your computer is not secure". Hartford Advocate. 2006-04-27. 
  • The point of terrorism is to cause terror, sometimes to further a political goal and sometimes out of sheer hatred. The people terrorists kill are not the targets; they are collateral damage. And blowing up planes, trains, markets or buses is not the goal; those are just tactics.
    The real targets of terrorism are the rest of us: the billions of us who are not killed but are terrorized because of the killing. The real point of terrorism is not the act itself, but our reaction to the act.
    And we're doing exactly what the terrorists want.
  • There are two kinds of cryptography in this world: cryptography that will stop your kid sister from reading your files, and cryptography that will stop major governments from reading your files.
  • The lesson here is that it is insufficient to protect ourselves with laws; we need to protect ourselves with mathematics. Encryption is too important to be left solely to governments.
  • The very definition of news is something that hardly ever happens. If an incident is in the news, we shouldn't worry about it. It's when something is so common that its no longer news – car crashes, domestic violence – that we should worry.

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