TAG | Talking security with Bruce Almighty |
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| by Sam Varghese | |
| Friday, 01 February 2008 | |
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Page 3 of 6 The ability you have to make very complex concepts simple without trivialising them is very rare. I think we need it everywhere. Because debates in society are hard - when they're about healthcare, which is huge in my country or different aspects of infrastructure or welfare or politics or social networking. These are all complicated issues. I mean, we need to make them accessible. Take an issue like the national identity card. It is being driven by various special interest groups. Politicians love it because it gives people this apparent feeling of being secure. How exactly do you figh against something like that? You know, you might not be able to. I combat it with information. I write essays and op-eds explaining why it doesn't make things more secure. I testified for the US senate, for a committee of the US Senate about national ID cards, why they wouldn't help. So you know, my solution is information - and, yeah, it's not perfect, I might not win - but I think that's my only option, to help people understand, by explaining it in a way that they can understand it and explain it to somebody else. You talk about airline security. Now, in Israel, it has been a fact of life there are Mossad people, Shin Bet people on board the El Al planes. Nobody has known about it for years and years and years, but they've been there, I think, after a hijacking in 1968. So can you really say that the presence of marshals is not of any use? I don't say it's of no use. In fact, what I say, and I wrote it in a Wired article just last week was that approximately two things have made it safer. The first one is reinforcing the cockpit door and the second is convincing passengers they need to fight back. And the third one, which might or might not be affected, is sky marshals. I don't say they're not effective. i think the jury is out, we don't know for sure. But it's interesting that it's not sky marshals per se; it's the idea of sky marshals that's effective. Because once I tell you I have them, I actually don't really need them anymore. So that's what I'm not sure about. That's what I've always hedged about, because again we just don't have the data to know really whether it helps or not. But it might, and that's one of the things that I'm on the fence about. During your career, you've debunked and exposed a large number of snake-oil salesmen. How do you handle it when they attack you back? A lot of it I ignore. If it gets really bad I'll just publish what they write and that usually makes them go away. Every year or so someone tries to sue me for something I've said and usually it's just a matter of publishing the complaints because it's always entertaining to read. When other people read it and if they get enough negative PR from it they go away. It's hard, but occasionally people have a legitimate complaint so you have to read everything. So you get attacked, but you know, I'm not perfect, I'll make mistakes. So you can't let it bother you. I tend not to do product reviews. When I put something in the dog house, it's something pretty egregious and it's based on ridiculous marketing claims - not based on source code analyses. I'm doing that, usually doing that as a consultant and that's a different sort of animal. So you live with it, so you deal with it. |
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