Hacking Society, Hacking Humanity

Presented at HOPE 2020 Virtual Rescheduled, July 25, 2020, 7 p.m. (60 minutes)

A hacker mindset is essential to understanding the security of complex technological systems. This way of thinking applies much more broadly: not only to socio-technical systems but to purely social systems as well. Tax loopholes, for example, can be understood as hacks of the tax code. Disinformation campaigns can be understood as hacks of the democratic election process. This talk extends the core language of hacking to the broad systems that underlie our society. Bruce will talk about what it means to hack the law, to hack the market economy, and to hack the democratic process. Others have written about how social engineering hacks trust and authority, and how social media sites hack attention. Bruce will generalize this further, discussing how our cognitive systems are hacked. Finally, he will extend these notions to discuss artificial intelligence and robotics; these systems will hack what it means to be human, and also how we react to things we react to as human. In the 21st century, everything is a socio-technical system, and everything is vulnerable to hacking. Our experience and expertise is necessary to secure these systems, and the goal of this talk is to explain how we can do that.


Presenters:

  • Bruce Schneier
    **Bruce Schneier** is an internationally renowned security technologist, called a security guru by *The Economist.* He is *The New York Times* best-selling author of 14 books - including *Click Here to Kill Everybody* - 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. He is a fellow at the Berkman-Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University; a lecturer in public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School; a board member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, AccessNow, and the Tor Project; and an advisory board member of EPIC and VerifiedVoting.org. He is the chief of security architecture of Inrupt, Inc.<br>

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