security theater

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The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can't Stand Positive Thinking by Oliver Burkeman

classic study, Day of the Dead, experimental subject, fear of failure, hedonic treadmill, Kibera, Lao Tzu, meta-analysis, Mikhail Gorbachev, Paradox of Choice, science of happiness, security theater, selection bias, Steve Jobs, summit fever, Supply of New York City Cabdrivers, traveling salesman, World Values Survey

But at the root of it all, Schneier argues, is the fundamental human desire for a feeling of safety and security – even though this feeling may be only indirectly related, at best, to being more safe or secure. Schneier coined the term ‘security theatre’ to refer to all those measures that are designed primarily to increase the feeling of security, without actually making people more secure. Indeed, it is perfectly possible to argue – Schneier has often done so – that security theatre in fact makes us less secure. It swallows resources that might otherwise be expended on more effective anti-terrorism measures, such as intelligence-gathering, and it makes passengers and security staff less alert to the kinds of suspicious behaviour they ought to be noticing.

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A posting on Schneier’s blog explained that the barriers would be constructed at Liverpool Lime Street, that city’s primary rail station, but that they would not be constructed at less busy suburban commuter stations, a few miles along the same stretch of track. The blog post was headlined: ‘UK Spends Billions To Force Rail Terrorists To Drive a Little Further’. Brown’s announcement was a classic piece of security theatre: a costly way to make travellers feel safer – so long as they didn’t reflect too closely on the details – while doing nothing to deter an even slightly diligent terrorist. In this book so far, we have seen how some of the most basic doctrines that dominate our thinking about happiness fail to work because we struggle for them too strenuously.

Engineering Security by Peter Gutmann

active measures, address space layout randomization, air gap, algorithmic trading, Amazon Web Services, Asperger Syndrome, bank run, barriers to entry, bitcoin, Brian Krebs, business process, call centre, card file, cloud computing, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, cognitive load, combinatorial explosion, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Debian, domain-specific language, Donald Davies, Donald Knuth, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, Dunning–Kruger effect, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, false flag, fault tolerance, Firefox, fundamental attribution error, George Akerlof, glass ceiling, GnuPG, Google Chrome, Hacker News, information security, iterative process, Jacob Appelbaum, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, John Conway, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Ken Thompson, Kickstarter, lake wobegon effect, Laplace demon, linear programming, litecoin, load shedding, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Multics, Network effects, nocebo, operational security, Paradox of Choice, Parkinson's law, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, Pierre-Simon Laplace, place-making, post-materialism, QR code, quantum cryptography, race to the bottom, random walk, recommendation engine, RFID, risk tolerance, Robert Metcalfe, rolling blackouts, Ruby on Rails, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, Satoshi Nakamoto, security theater, semantic web, seminal paper, Skype, slashdot, smart meter, social intelligence, speech recognition, SQL injection, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stuxnet, sunk-cost fallacy, supply-chain attack, telemarketer, text mining, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Market for Lemons, the payments system, Therac-25, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, Turing complete, Turing machine, Turing test, Wayback Machine, web application, web of trust, x509 certificate, Y2K, zero day, Zimmermann PGP

This is an eternal problem with security, no-one notices it until it’s broken so there’s a strong temptation to make it unnecessarily invasive just to let users know that it’s actually there. There’s even a special name for these types of measures when they’re encountered in the physical world, “security theatre”. Warning dialogs and popups are the security theatre of computer security. Unfortunately most users couldn’t care less about the details, they just want to be assured that they’re secure without needing to have the nitty-gritty details thrust in their faces all the time. This is an unfortunate clash between the goals of developers and users: developers want to show off their work but since it doesn’t provide any direct benefit to users, users don’t want to see it.

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This type of user interface mostly serves the needs of the developer rather than the user (note that in many cases at least some indication that security measures are present and active is still required, an issue that’s covered in “SSL Certificates: Indistinguishable from Placebo” on page 33). Moving beyond warning dialogs and popups, another example of a security-theatre “feature” that’s added to a number of user interfaces is the ability to apply time-based access control restrictions for consumer networking devices. Virtually every home router and firewall that allows setting access controls provides a — usually very complex — interface to set time-based controls.

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“Learning More About the Underground Economy: A Case-Study of Keyloggers and Dropzones”, Thorsten Holz, Markus Engelberth and Felix Freiling, University of Mannheim Laboratory for Dependable Distributed Systems technical report TR-2008-006, http://honeyblog.org/junkyard/reports/impersonation-attacksTR.pdf. [98] [99] [100] [101] [102] [103] “The Myths of Security: What the Computer Security Industry Doesn’t Want You to Know”, John Viega, O’Reilly, 2009. “Security Theater on the Wells Fargo Website”, Don Bixby, 13 March 2013, discussion thread at http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2013/03/security_theate_8.html#c1213990. “So Long, And No Thanks for the Externalities: The Rational Rejection of Security Advice by Users”, Cormac Herley, Proceedings of the 2009 New Security Paradigms Workshop (NSPW’09), September 2009, p.133.

Vertical: The City From Satellites to Bunkers by Stephen Graham

1960s counterculture, Anthropocene, Bandra-Worli Sea Link, Berlin Wall, Boris Johnson, Buckminster Fuller, Buy land – they’re not making it any more, Chelsea Manning, commodity super cycle, creative destruction, Crossrail, deindustrialization, digital capitalism, digital divide, digital map, Dr. Strangelove, drone strike, Edward Glaeser, Edward Snowden, Elisha Otis, energy security, Frank Gehry, gentrification, ghettoisation, Google Earth, Gunnar Myrdal, high net worth, housing crisis, Howard Zinn, illegal immigration, Indoor air pollution, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jane Jacobs, late capitalism, Leo Hollis, Lewis Mumford, low earth orbit, mass immigration, means of production, megacity, megaproject, megastructure, military-industrial complex, moral panic, mutually assured destruction, new economy, New Urbanism, no-fly zone, nuclear winter, oil shale / tar sands, planetary scale, plutocrats, post-industrial society, Project Plowshare, rent control, Richard Florida, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, security theater, Skype, South China Sea, space junk, Strategic Defense Initiative, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, trickle-down economics, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, white flight, WikiLeaks, William Langewiesche

Where they function, cross-border tunnels work to render the above-ground discourses of perfect, militarised control as little less than a post 9/11 ‘security theatre’. They radically undermine the way militarised and patrolled borders are brought into being through a series of architectural fallacies asserting perfect administrative control. They thus work to challenge lucrative military-industrial fantasies, organised by politicians and contractors to symbolise projects deemed to ‘protect’ vulnerable national identities against some demonised, external or racialised other.28 Because the lethal security theatre of the above-ground walls relies on demonising all that it forces both beyond and below ground, by definition it very often also disguises the real nature of what flows in the tunnels.

Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness by Simone Browne

4chan, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airport security, autonomous vehicles, bitcoin, British Empire, cloud computing, colonial rule, computer vision, crowdsourcing, dark matter, disinformation, Edward Snowden, European colonialism, ghettoisation, Google Glasses, Internet Archive, job satisfaction, lifelogging, machine readable, mass incarceration, obamacare, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pattern recognition, r/findbostonbombers, Scientific racism, security theater, sexual politics, transatlantic slave trade, urban renewal, US Airways Flight 1549, W. E. B. Du Bois, Wayback Machine, Works Progress Administration

I also explore the contemporary circulation of branding artifacts for sale online and take up visual artists Mendi + Keith Obadike’s Blackness for Sale, where Keith Obadike put his blackness up for sale on eBay.com as a way to question the current trade in slave memorabilia and branding blackness. Chapter 4, “‘What Did TSA Find in Solange’s Fro’?: Security Theater at the Airport,” asks, broadly, what the experiences of black women in airports can tell us about the airport as a social formation. This chapter also examines art and artworks at and about the airport and popular culture representations of post-9/11 security practices at the airport to form a general theory of security theater. This is far from saying that security measures and security theater at the airport are a strictly post-9/11 formation. Between 1970 and 2000 there were 184 hijackings of U.S. commercial airline flights, while for foreign carriers during that period hijackings totaled 586.74 Garrett Brock Trapnell hijacked one of those planes, Trans World Airlines Flight 2 from Los Angeles to New York on January 28, 1972, and during this hijacking he reportedly said: “I’m going to tell you exactly what I want.

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I also examine the discretionary power wielded by TSA agents and by airline workers by looking at cases of, mainly, black women who were subjected to invasive pat downs, hair searches, and other security theater measures. I do this as a way to question how black women are deployed in narratives about airport security, for example, through representations in popular culture as uninterested, sassy, and ineffective TSA agents. This chapter suggests that we pay attention to the ways that black women’s bodies come to represent, and also resist, security theater at the airport. The epilogue brings together this book’s key concerns around the question of what happens when blackness enters the frame, whether that be cameras that “can’t see black people” or centering blackness when it comes to questioning the logics of surveillance. 1 NOTES ON SURVEILLANCE STUDIES THROUGH THE DOOR OF NO RETURN The door is a place, real, imaginary and imagined.

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If the airport can be thought of as a site of learning, what can representations of security theater in popular culture and art at and about the airport tell us about the post-9/11 flying lessons of contemporary air travel? The second section of this chapter takes artworks produced in response to the post-9/11 airport as a form of social inquiry that can explore the various ways that people can navigate, comply with, refuse, and resist surveillance practices at airports. To do this, I turn to Pamela Z’s Baggage Allowance, Evan Roth’s Art in Airports series, and the digital art exhibition Terminal Zero One as they each question and critically engage security theater in contemporary air travel.

Nothing to Hide: The False Tradeoff Between Privacy and Security by Daniel J. Solove

Albert Einstein, cloud computing, Columbine, hindsight bias, illegal immigration, invention of the telephone, Marshall McLuhan, national security letter, Oklahoma City bombing, security theater, the medium is the message, Timothy McVeigh, traffic fines, urban planning

The security expert Bruce Schneier calls such measures “security theater,” for they constitute an elaborate exercise in playacting to create the appearance of security. Schneier writes: Security theater refers to security measures that make people feel more secure without doing anything to actually improve their security. An example: the photo ID checks that have sprung up in office buildings. No-one has ever explained why verifying that someone has a photo ID provides any actual security, but it looks like security to have a uniformed guard-for-hire looking at ID cards.10 Is security theater legitimate? Calming public fear is certainly a good thing, but the problem is that security theater is a lie.

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Unfortunately, rarely do discussions about the sacrifice of civil liberties explain why security benefits can’t be achieved in other ways and why such a security measure is the best and most logical one to take. Little scrutiny is given to security measures. They are often just accepted as a given, no matter how ill-conceived or ineffective they might be. Security Theater Some ineffective security measures, such as the New York City subway search program, are largely symbolic. The subway searches are unlikely to catch or deter terrorists because they involve only a minuscule fraction of the millions of daily passengers. Terrorists can easily turn to other targets or attempt the bombing on another day or at another train station where searches aren’t taking place.

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Calming public fear is certainly a good thing, but the problem is that security theater is a lie. I believe that most people would rather know the truth than feel better through deception. Meaningful protection of rights requires that they be sacrificed only when security measures are really effective. Rights shouldn’t be sacrificed for lies, no matter how noble the intention behind the lies might be. Why No Deference Is Good for Security Not only is a policy of no deference better for privacy rights, it is also better for security. If security officials know they’ll have to justify their policies, they might be more careful about which ones they decide to use.

Beautiful security by Andy Oram, John Viega

Albert Einstein, Amazon Web Services, An Inconvenient Truth, Bletchley Park, business intelligence, business process, call centre, cloud computing, corporate governance, credit crunch, crowdsourcing, defense in depth, do well by doing good, Donald Davies, en.wikipedia.org, fault tolerance, Firefox, information security, loose coupling, Marc Andreessen, market design, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Monroe Doctrine, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nick Leeson, Norbert Wiener, operational security, optical character recognition, packet switching, peer-to-peer, performance metric, pirate software, Robert Bork, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, security theater, SETI@home, Silicon Valley, Skype, software as a service, SQL injection, statistical model, Steven Levy, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, Upton Sinclair, web application, web of trust, zero day, Zimmermann PGP

Sabett 199 CONTENTS 13 14 15 16 Culture Balance Communication Doing the Right Thing 200 202 207 211 BEAUTIFUL LOG HANDLING by Anton Chuvakin 213 Logs in Security Laws and Standards Focus on Logs When Logs Are Invaluable Challenges with Logs Case Study: Behind a Trashed Server Future Logging Conclusions 213 214 215 216 218 221 223 INCIDENT DETECTION: FINDING THE OTHER 68% by Grant Geyer and Brian Dunphy 225 A Common Starting Point Improving Detection with Context Improving Perspective with Host Logging Summary 226 228 232 237 DOING REAL WORK WITHOUT REAL DATA by Peter Wayner 239 How Data Translucency Works A Real-Life Example Personal Data Stored As a Convenience Trade-offs Going Deeper References 240 243 244 244 245 246 CASTING SPELLS: PC SECURITY THEATER by Michael Wood and Fernando Francisco 247 Growing Attacks, Defenses in Retreat The Illusion Revealed Better Practices for Desktop Security Conclusion 248 252 257 258 CONTRIBUTORS 259 INDEX 269 CONTENTS ix Preface I F ONE BELIEVES THAT NEWS HEADLINES REVEAL TRENDS , THESE ARE INTERESTING times for computer security buffs.

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, by James Routh Chapter 12, Oh No, Here Come the Infosecurity Lawyers!, by Randy V. Sabett Chapter 13, Beautiful Log Handling, by Anton Chuvakin Chapter 14, Incident Detection: Finding the Other 68%, by Grant Geyer and Brian Dunphy Chapter 15, Doing Real Work Without Real Data, by Peter Wayner Chapter 16, Casting Spells: PC Security Theater, by Michael Wood and Fernando Francisco Conventions Used in This Book The following typographical conventions are used in this book: Italic Indicates new terms, URLs, filenames, and Unix utilities. Constant width Indicates the contents of computer files and generally anything found in programs.

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Surgi-Center, No. 2005-04976.” N.Y. App. Div, September 25, 2007. Wayner, Peter. Translucent Databases. Flyzone, 2003. http://www.wayner.org/books/td/. Zeller, Tom Jr. “U.S. Settles With Company on Leak of Consumers’ Data,” New York Times. January 27, 2006. 246 CHAPTER FIFTEEN CHAPTER SIXTEEN Casting Spells: PC Security Theater Michael Wood Fernando Francisco S TORM CLOUDS GATHER AND THERE IS UNREST IN THE LAND ; THIEVES WANDER the highway with impunity, monsters hide in every tree along the road, and wizards cast spells while handing travelers amulets for their protection. Believing in the power of the talismans, our hero strides forth, wrapped in his magical invincibility, confident he will be the master of any threat he encounters.

New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future by James Bridle

AI winter, Airbnb, Alfred Russel Wallace, AlphaGo, Anthropocene, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-land, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Boeing 747, British Empire, Brownian motion, Buckminster Fuller, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, coastline paradox / Richardson effect, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, combinatorial explosion, computer vision, congestion charging, cryptocurrency, data is the new oil, disinformation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Hofstadter, Dr. Strangelove, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Eyjafjallajökull, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, fear of failure, Flash crash, fulfillment center, Google Earth, Greyball, Haber-Bosch Process, Higgs boson, hive mind, income inequality, informal economy, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, ITER tokamak, James Bridle, John von Neumann, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, Large Hadron Collider, late capitalism, Laura Poitras, Leo Hollis, lone genius, machine translation, mandelbrot fractal, meta-analysis, Minecraft, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, Network effects, oil shock, p-value, pattern recognition, peak oil, recommendation engine, road to serfdom, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, security theater, self-driving car, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, social graph, sorting algorithm, South China Sea, speech recognition, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, stem cell, Stuxnet, technoutopianism, the built environment, the scientific method, Uber for X, undersea cable, University of East Anglia, uranium enrichment, Vannevar Bush, warehouse robotics, WikiLeaks

The critical event has already occurred, and the underlying causes are always ignored. Considering the efficacy of surveillance in this way forces us to reflect on our own strategies for opposing abuses of power. Does throwing light on the subject really help? Improved lighting has long been one of the axioms of security theatre itself, but the installation of lighting on city streets has as often been followed by a rise in crime as it has preceded a fall.36 Criminals may be as emboldened by the light as any victim: when everything is well lit, the malicious look a lot less suspicious, and they know when the coast is clear.

Getting Things Done for Hackers by Lars Wirzenius

anti-pattern, Debian, Firefox, full text search, Inbox Zero, Kickstarter, Merlin Mann, security theater

CALENDARS AND OTHER REMINDER SYSTEMS previous time is a good time to cut your nails. Having your computer remind you about it makes it much more likely that you’ll do it when it’s time. However, having your calendar remind you every twelve days may not work so well, because you might be travelling on that 12th day, and the annoying flight security theater made it impossible to take your nail cutter with you. (This is not a hypothetical example.) A better solution would remind you twelve days after the previous time you actually cut the nails, not after the previous reminder. I have a program called “nagger” which does exactly that, but it is not suitable for others to use (unless you dig editing procmailrc files, and probably not even then).

The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail-But Some Don't by Nate Silver

airport security, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, An Inconvenient Truth, availability heuristic, Bayesian statistics, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, big-box store, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Boeing 747, book value, Broken windows theory, business cycle, buy and hold, Carmen Reinhart, Charles Babbage, classic study, Claude Shannon: information theory, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, complexity theory, computer age, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, disinformation, diversification, Donald Trump, Edmond Halley, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, en.wikipedia.org, equity premium, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, fear of failure, Fellow of the Royal Society, Ford Model T, Freestyle chess, fudge factor, Future Shock, George Akerlof, global pandemic, Goodhart's law, haute cuisine, Henri Poincaré, high batting average, housing crisis, income per capita, index fund, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet Archive, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Japanese asset price bubble, John Bogle, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, Laplace demon, locking in a profit, Loma Prieta earthquake, market bubble, Mikhail Gorbachev, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Monroe Doctrine, mortgage debt, Nate Silver, negative equity, new economy, Norbert Wiener, Oklahoma City bombing, PageRank, pattern recognition, pets.com, Phillips curve, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Plato's cave, power law, prediction markets, Productivity paradox, proprietary trading, public intellectual, random walk, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, savings glut, security theater, short selling, SimCity, Skype, statistical model, Steven Pinker, The Great Moderation, The Market for Lemons, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Timothy McVeigh, too big to fail, transaction costs, transfer pricing, University of East Anglia, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Wayback Machine, wikimedia commons

It’s much easier to bust a sixteen-year-old kid for smoking a joint than to solve an auto theft or prevent a murder. Everybody likes to live in a cleaner, safer neighborhood. But it’s unclear whether the broken-windows theory is more than window dressing. Likewise, the ever more cumbersome requirements for commercial flights fall into the category of what the security expert Bruce Schneier calls “security theater”75—they are more for show than to actually deter terrorists. It’s by no means completely irrational to be worried about airport security; airplanes have been the subject of a large number of terror attacks in the past, and terrorism can have a copycat element.76 Yet even accounting for crashes that had nothing to do with terrorism, only about one passenger for every twenty-five million was killed on an American commercial airliner during the decade of the 2000s.77 Even if you fly twenty times per year, you are about twice as likely to be struck by lightning.

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Harcourt and Jens Ludwig, “Broken Windows: New Evidence from New York City and a Five-City Social Experiment,” University of Chicago Law Review, 73 (2006). http://lawreview.uchicago.edu/sites/lawreview.uchicago.edu/files/uploads/73.1/73_1_Harcourt_Ludwig.pdf. 75. Bruce Schneier, “Beyond Security Theater,” Schneier on Security, November 13, 2009. http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/11/beyond_security.html. 76. Ibid., Kindle location 1035. 77. Nate Silver, “Crunching the Risk Numbers,” Wall Street Journal, January 8, 2010. http://Online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703481004574646963713065116.html. 78.

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Senate, 109th Congress, 2nd Session; September 8, 2006. http://intelligence.senate.gov/phaseiiaccuracy.pdf. 85. Martin Chulov and Helen Pidd, “Defector Admits to WMD Lies That Triggered Iraq War,” The Guardian, February 15, 2011. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/feb/15/defector-admits-wmd-lies-iraq-war. 86. Schneier, “Beyond Security Theater,” Kindle locations 1321–1322. 87. Harvey E. Lapan and Todd Sandler, “Terrorism and Signalling,” European Journal of Political Economy, 9, 3 (August 1993), pp. 383–397; 88. The 9/11 Commission Report, Kindle locations 9286–9287. 89. Michael A. Babyak, “What You See May Not Be What You Get: A Brief, Nontechnical Introduction to Overfitting in Regression-Type Models,” Psychosomatic Medicine, 66 (2004), pp. 411–.421; 2004. http://os1.amc.nl/mediawiki/images/Babyak_-_overfitting.pdf.

Infinite Detail by Tim Maughan

3D printing, augmented reality, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, cognitive dissonance, driverless car, fake news, Free Software Foundation, friendly fire, gentrification, global supply chain, hydroponic farming, Internet of things, Mason jar, messenger bag, off grid, Panamax, post-Panamax, ransomware, RFID, rolling blackouts, security theater, self-driving car, Skype, smart cities, South China Sea, surveillance capitalism, the built environment, urban decay, urban planning

In the bathroom he realizes that the long window is a two-way mirror, which seems pointless as all the cubicles—sorry, stalls—have doors anyway. Whatever. He’d abandoned the idea of there being any logic to security theater years ago. The idea she’d just hand him his spex like that because of his accent was bullshit too; she probably gives them back to anybody who actually asks. Unofficial policy, for practical sanity, to stop everyone kicking off all the time. It’s no big deal being in here, really. Security theater. Bullshit and ritual. Fear and flag-waving. He shakes his head and ducks into the stall. * * * He thumbs the power on the spex, checks the LED is green for charge, and slips them onto his face.

This Will Make You Smarter: 150 New Scientific Concepts to Improve Your Thinking by John Brockman

23andMe, adjacent possible, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Anthropocene, banking crisis, Barry Marshall: ulcers, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, biofilm, Black Swan, Bletchley Park, butterfly effect, Cass Sunstein, cloud computing, cognitive load, congestion charging, correlation does not imply causation, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, data acquisition, David Brooks, delayed gratification, Emanuel Derman, epigenetics, Evgeny Morozov, Exxon Valdez, Flash crash, Flynn Effect, Garrett Hardin, Higgs boson, hive mind, impulse control, information retrieval, information security, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Large Hadron Collider, lifelogging, machine translation, mandelbrot fractal, market design, Mars Rover, Marshall McLuhan, microbiome, Murray Gell-Mann, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, ocean acidification, open economy, Pierre-Simon Laplace, place-making, placebo effect, power law, pre–internet, QWERTY keyboard, random walk, randomized controlled trial, rent control, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, Richard Thaler, Satyajit Das, Schrödinger's Cat, scientific management, security theater, selection bias, Silicon Valley, Stanford marshmallow experiment, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, Stuart Kauffman, sugar pill, synthetic biology, the scientific method, Thorstein Veblen, Turing complete, Turing machine, twin studies, Vilfredo Pareto, Walter Mischel, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

Science Versus Theater Ross Anderson Professor of security engineering, University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory; researcher in the economics and psychology of information security Modern societies waste billions on protective measures whose real aim is to reassure rather than to reduce risk. Those of us who work in security engineering refer to this as “security theater,” and there are examples all around us. We’re searched going into buildings that no terrorist would attack. Social-network operators create the pretense of a small intimate group of “friends,” in order to inveigle users into disclosing personal information that can be sold to advertisers. The users get not privacy but privacy theater.

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., 242–45 Randall, Lisa, 192–93 randomness, 105–8 rational unconscious, 146–49 ratios, 186 Read, Leonard, 258 realism, naïve, 214 Reality Club, xxix recursive structure, 246–49 reductionism, 278 Rees, Martin, 1–2 regression, 235 ARISE and, 235–36 relationalism, 223 relativism, 223, 300 relativity, 25, 64, 72, 234, 297 religion, 5, 6, 114 creationism, 268–69 self-transcendence and, 212–13 supernatural beings in, 182–83 and thinking in time vs. outside of time, 222 repetition, in manufacture, 171 replicability, 373–75 Revkin, Andrew, 386–88 Ridley, Matt, 257–58 risk, 56–57, 68–71, 339 security theater and, 262 statistical thinking and, 260 risk aversion, 339 risk literacy, 259–61 Ritchie, Matthew, 237–39 Robertson, Pat, 10 Roman Empire, 128 root-cause analysis, 303–4 Rosen, Jay, 203–5 Rovelli, Carlo, 51–52 Rowan, David, 305–6 Rucker, Rudy, 103–4 Rushkoff, Douglas, 41–42 Russell, Bertrand, 123 Rwanda, 345 Saatchi, Charles, 307–8 safety, proving, 281 Saffo, Paul, 334–35 Sagan, Carl, 273, 282 Sakharov, Andrei, 88 Salcedo-Albarán, Eduardo, 345–48 Sampson, Scott D., 289–91 Sapolsky, Robert, 278–80 Sasselov, Dimitar, 13–14, 292–93 SAT tests, 47, 89 scale analysis, 184–87 scale transitions, 371–72 scaling laws, 162 Schank, Roger, 23–24 Schmidt, Eric, 305 schools, see education Schrödinger’s cat, 28 Schulz, Kathryn, 30–31 science, 192–93 discoveries in, 109–11, 240–41, 257 humanities and, 364–66 method of, 273–74 normal, 242–43, 244 pessimistic meta-induction from history of, 30–31 replicability in, 373–75 statistically significant difference and, 378–80 theater vs., 262–63 scientific concept, 19, 22 scientific lifestyle, 19–22 scientific proof, 51, 52 scuba divers, 40 seconds, 163 security engineering, 262 security in information-sharing, 75–76 Segre, Gino, 28–29 Sehgal, Tino, 119 Seife, Charles, 105–8 Sejnowski, Terrence, 162–64 self, 212 ARISE and, 235–36 consciousness, 217 Other and, 292–93 separateness of, 289–91 subselves and the modular mind, 129–31 transcendence of, 212–13 self-control, 46–48 self-model, 214 self-serving bias, 37–38, 40 Seligman, Martin, 92–93 Semelweiss, Ignaz, 36 senses, 43, 139–42 umwelt and, 143–45 sensory desktop, 135–38 September 11 attacks, 386 serendipity, 101–2 serotonin, 230 sexuality, 78 sexual selection, 228, 353–54 Shamir, Adi, 76 SHAs (shorthand abstractions), xxx, 228, 277, 395–97 graceful, 120–23 Shepherd, Jonathan, 274 Shermer, Michael, 157–59 shifting baseline syndrome, 90–91 Shirky, Clay, xxvii, 198, 338 signal detection theory, 389–93 Signal Detection Theory and Psychophysics (Green and Swets), 391 signals, 228 Simon, Herbert, 48 simplicity, 325–27 skeptical empiricism, 85 skepticism, 242, 243, 336 skydivers, 39 Smallberg, Gerald, 43–45 smell, sense of, 139–42, 143–44 Smith, Adam, 258 Smith, Barry C., 139–42 Smith, Hamilton, 166 Smith, Laurence C., 310–11 Smith, John Maynard, 96 Smolin, Lee, 221–24 social microbialism, 16 social networks, 82, 262, 266 social sciences, 273 Socrates, 340 software, 80, 246 Solomon Islands, 361 something for nothing, 84 specialness, see uniqueness and specialness Sperber, Dan, 180–83 spider bites, 68, 69, 70 spoon bending, 244 stability, 128 Standage, Tom, 281 stars, 7, 128, 301 statistically significant difference, 378–80 statistics, 260, 356 stem-cell research, 56, 69–70 stock market, 59, 60–61, 151, 339 Flash Crash and, 60–61 Pareto distributions and, 199, 200 Stodden, Victoria, 371–72 stomach ulcers, 240 Stone, Linda, 240–41 stress, 68, 70, 71 string theories, 113, 114, 299, 322 subselves and the modular mind, 129–31 success, failure and, 79–80 sun, 1, 7, 11, 164 distance between Earth and, 53–54 sunk-cost trap, 121 sunspots, 110 Superorganism, The (Hölldobler and Wilson), 196–97 superorganisms, 196 contingent, 196–97 supervenience, 276, 363–66 Susskind, Leonard, 297 Swets, John, 391 symbols and images, 152–53 synapses, 164 synesthesia, 136–37 systemic equilibrium, 237–39 Szathmáry, Eörs, 96 Taleb, Nassim, 315 TANSTAAFL (“There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch”), 84 Tapscott, Don, 250–53 taste, 140–42 tautologies, 355–56 Taylor, F.

Dragnet Nation: A Quest for Privacy, Security, and Freedom in a World of Relentless Surveillance by Julia Angwin

AltaVista, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, bitcoin, Chelsea Manning, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean water, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, data is the new oil, David Graeber, Debian, disinformation, Edward Snowden, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, Garrett Hardin, GnuPG, Google Chrome, Google Glasses, Ida Tarbell, incognito mode, informal economy, Jacob Appelbaum, John Gilmore, John Markoff, Julian Assange, Laura Poitras, Marc Andreessen, market bubble, market design, medical residency, meta-analysis, mutually assured destruction, operational security, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, prediction markets, price discrimination, randomized controlled trial, RFID, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, security theater, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart meter, sparse data, Steven Levy, Tragedy of the Commons, Upton Sinclair, WikiLeaks, Y2K, zero-sum game, Zimmermann PGP

” * * * The surveillance of Yasir Afifi appears to have started with an innocent question about why deodorant could not pass through an airport screening. On June 24, 2010, a user of the social networking website Reddit.com named “JayClay” posted a question: “So if my deodorant could be a bomb, why are you just chucking it in the bin?” His post generated hundreds of comments. Some Reddit users dubbed the deodorant ban “Security Theater.” Others talked about items they had smuggled onto planes—nail clippers, bamboo needles, razors, knives. One user suggested that bombing a mall would be a “softer target.” On June 25, a user named “Khaledthegypsy” weighed in: “bombing a mall seems so easy to do,” he wrote. “i mean all you really need is a bomb, a regular outfit so you arent the crazy guy in a trench coat trying to blow up a mall and a shopping bag. i mean if terrorism were actually a legitimate threat, think about how many fucking malls would have blown up already.”

…

Party”) RSA firm Rutgers University Rwanda Safari salting San Francisco Chronicle Satellite Sentinel Project Scheindlin, Shira Schley, Courtney Schmidt, Eric Schneier, Bruce Schneier on Security (Schneier) Schoenberg, Evan schools Schrems, Max Science Scoble, Robert SearchBug.com search engines. See also specific search engines auditing your data on search warrants Secret New York (Rives) secret police Secrets & Lies (Schneier) Secret Service security, privacy vs. Security Engineering (Anderson) security questions Security Theater September 11, 2001, attacks sexual orientation Shahzad, Faisal Shearson, Julia Shilkin, Rob Shiller, Benjamin Reed Shopping.com Shutova, Ekaterina Shutterfly Signal conference Silent Circle Silent Phone Silent Text Sinclair, Upton Singer-Vine, Jeremy Skyhook Skype Slobogin, Christopher smart card Smith, Stephen Smith, Will Snowden, Edward social networking sites.

Why We Drive: Toward a Philosophy of the Open Road by Matthew B. Crawford

1960s counterculture, Airbus A320, airport security, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Boeing 737 MAX, British Empire, Burning Man, business logic, call centre, classic study, collective bargaining, confounding variable, congestion pricing, crony capitalism, data science, David Sedaris, deskilling, digital map, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, emotional labour, en.wikipedia.org, Fellow of the Royal Society, Ford Model T, gamification, gentrification, gig economy, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, Herbert Marcuse, hive mind, Ian Bogost, income inequality, informal economy, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, labour mobility, Lyft, mirror neurons, Network effects, New Journalism, New Urbanism, Nicholas Carr, planned obsolescence, Ponzi scheme, precautionary principle, Ralph Nader, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Sam Peltzman, security theater, self-driving car, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, smart cities, social graph, social intelligence, Stephen Hawking, surveillance capitalism, tacit knowledge, tech worker, technoutopianism, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, time dilation, too big to fail, traffic fines, Travis Kalanick, trolley problem, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Unsafe at Any Speed, urban planning, Wall-E, Works Progress Administration

The posted speeds make technical violators out of motorists driving at reasonable and safe speeds.”8 One can find parallels in other policy areas where a proliferation of rules provides a sheen of rationality, but it is in the gap between the rules and reasonableness that officialdom feeds.9 Rigid sentencing laws and the “war on drugs” were indispensable to the rise of a massive prison industry. The TSA comes up with rules for a stage production of “security theater” that each of us must perform, while knowing full well the absurdity of most of it. Those machines you step into and receive a big dose of microwaves from? And the wipe-down with a towelette that is then inserted into a black box to detect explosive residue? Largely useless. The military refuses to use them; instead they use dogs if they are looking for explosives.

…

Just as with mechanized traffic enforcement, this social apparatus has to characterize people as childlike in their vulnerability, and the world as bristling with hazards that need to be regulated. A further parallel is that the system guarantees more collisions, as it were, and hence calls for more intervention. Our social amber time is approaching zero. 10.Jason Chaffetz, former chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, details the absurdities of airport security theater in his book The Deep State. In contemporary America, the role of Congress appears to be mainly that of brokering business deals, using its budgetary oversight of the administrative state (the customer) to take a brokerage fee in the form of campaign contributions from vendors—while distracting voters with culture war.

On the Clock: What Low-Wage Work Did to Me and How It Drives America Insane by Emily Guendelsberger

Adam Curtis, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Picking Challenge, autism spectrum disorder, basic income, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cognitive dissonance, company town, David Attenborough, death from overwork, deskilling, do what you love, Donald Trump, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, future of work, hive mind, housing crisis, independent contractor, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, job automation, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Jon Ronson, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, Kiva Systems, late capitalism, Lean Startup, market design, McDonald's hot coffee lawsuit, McJob, Minecraft, Nicholas Carr, Nomadland, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pattern recognition, precariat, Richard Thaler, San Francisco homelessness, scientific management, Second Machine Age, security theater, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, speech recognition, TaskRabbit, tech worker, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tony Hsieh, Toyota Production System, Travis Kalanick, union organizing, universal basic income, unpaid internship, Upton Sinclair, wage slave, working poor

I wasn’t pleased with the idea of being searched every single day, which would make it hard to bring in a pencil and paper, much less the voice recorder I’d hoped to smuggle in to take notes while walking. But… Wait—can a security system tell the difference between electronics in a car key fob and electronics in a memory card? I’m pretty sure it can’t. I hope beyond hope that this new “high-tech system” is just security theater. “Now, this is a slide everybody loves the most,” Miguel finally says after nearly two hours. “You know why that is? Because it’s the last one!” It’s identical to the first: WORK HARD. HAVE FUN. MAKE HISTORY. I snap awake when my alarm goes off at 4:00 a.m. the next day. Being up at this hour feels absurd, but I figure it’ll give me enough time to shower, dress, have breakfast, drive the forty-five minutes to SDF8, and still arrive with half an hour of padding.

…

Decrease the number of objectives workers have for each call so they aren’t as mentally and emotionally taxing E. Install a program that badgers workers with corrective pop-ups telling them that they sound tired Seriously—what kind of fucking sociopath goes with E? But it doesn’t actually matter whether Convergys uses this kind of software. As with SDF8’s security theater, what’s important is that a lot of people believe it’s being used and fear it.* I used to live near Philly’s Eastern State Penitentiary, a tourist destination that looks like a few square blocks of medieval castle plunked down into a residential neighborhood. From above, though, it looks a bit like a flower, or a windmill: It’s one of the first physical examples of a panopticon, a concept dreamed up by British philosopher Jeremy Bentham in the late eighteenth century.

Fancy Bear Goes Phishing: The Dark History of the Information Age, in Five Extraordinary Hacks by Scott J. Shapiro

3D printing, 4chan, active measures, address space layout randomization, air gap, Airbnb, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, availability heuristic, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, blockchain, borderless world, Brian Krebs, business logic, call centre, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, cellular automata, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, Compatible Time-Sharing System, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, cyber-physical system, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Debian, Dennis Ritchie, disinformation, Donald Trump, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, dumpster diving, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, evil maid attack, facts on the ground, false flag, feminist movement, Gabriella Coleman, gig economy, Hacker News, independent contractor, information security, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invisible hand, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Julian Assange, Ken Thompson, Larry Ellison, Laura Poitras, Linda problem, loss aversion, macro virus, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Minecraft, Morris worm, Multics, PalmPilot, Paul Graham, pirate software, pre–internet, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, ransomware, Reflections on Trusting Trust, Richard Stallman, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, Satoshi Nakamoto, security theater, Shoshana Zuboff, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Skype, SoftBank, SQL injection, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, supply-chain attack, surveillance capitalism, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech worker, technological solutionism, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the new new thing, the payments system, Turing machine, Turing test, Unsafe at Any Speed, vertical integration, Von Neumann architecture, Wargames Reagan, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War, Wayback Machine, web application, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, young professional, zero day, éminence grise

Schneier looks just as our Representativeness Heuristic says he should: trim, medium height, with a full, well-groomed gray beard and perpetually balding hair tied into a long ponytail. Schneier is known for his flowery shirts and flattop taxicab hats. He is outspoken and unapologetic. Schneier invented the term security theater, arguing that the post-9/11 reforms to airline security only make us feel safer. In reality, they’ve made us less safe. According to Schneier, the purpose of x-raying your shoes is to convince you to get on the plane, not to stop terrorists from blowing it up. On September 13, 2016, Schneier posted a disturbing entry titled “Someone Is Learning How to Take Down the Internet” on Lawfare, a blog widely read by the national security community.

…

The Minecraft Wars only make us feel safer: Bruce Schneier, Beyond Fear: Thinking Sensibly About Security in an Uncertain World (New York: Copernicus Books, 2003). from blowing it up: Bruce Schneier, “Is Aviation Security Mostly for Show?,” CNN, December 29, 2009, http://edition.cnn.com/2009/OPINION/12/29/schneier.air.travel.security.theater/. “precisely calibrated attacks”: Bruce Schneier, “Someone Is Learning How to Take Down the Internet,” Lawfare, September 13, 2016, https://www.lawfareblog.com/someone-learning-how-take-down-internet. DDoS: Schneier, “Someone Is Learning.” processing legitimate requests: “What Is a DDoS Attack,” Cloudflare Learning Center, accessed February 24, 2021, www.cloudflare.com/learning/ddos/what-is-a-ddos-attack.

HTML5 Cookbook by Christopher Schmitt, Kyle Simpson

Firefox, Internet Archive, machine readable, security theater, web application, WebSocket

While many security experts suggest applying autocomplete="off" to form fields that contain sensitive data, you should keep in mind that this is not a particularly effective security measure. Some browsers do not yet support autocomplete, and since so many tools exist to circumvent autocomplete="off"—tools that still auto-inject a user’s stored password—it’s often security theater or simply a false security measure. Those browsers that do not support autocomplete simply ignore the attribute altogether. For a browser support reference on autocomplete, see Table 3-11. Table 3-11. Browser support for the autocomplete attribute IE Firefox Chrome Safari Opera iOS Android Yes* 4+ Yes* Yes* 10.0+ Yes* Yes* Note In Table 3-11, “Yes” indicates that the browser has implemented autocomplete in a pre-HTML5, nonstandard way.

Bottoms Up and the Devil Laughs by Kerry Howley

air gap, Bernie Sanders, Chelsea Manning, cognitive bias, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, fake news, Joan Didion, Julian Assange, Laura Poitras, Nelson Mandela, operational security, pre–internet, QAnon, Russian election interference, security theater, Shoshana Zuboff, social graph, surveillance capitalism, WikiLeaks

This was something The Intercept had the capacity and expertise to do: report on documents a savvy leaker had handed them in a responsible way. It was, frankly, a pain in the ass, so much so that some of the staff felt the documents were underused; there was interesting stuff that was just too annoying to report on. Others thought it was security theater, a kind of self-important, self-imposed performance. The world of the small locked room is the world we can imagine Reality envisioned when she posted the document, but the journey her document took bore no relation to this at all. It would involve different players, and different protocols, if you could call them that.

The Antisocial Network: The GameStop Short Squeeze and the Ragtag Group of Amateur Traders That Brought Wall Street to Its Knees by Ben Mezrich

4chan, Asperger Syndrome, Bayesian statistics, bitcoin, Carl Icahn, contact tracing, data science, democratizing finance, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fake news, gamification, global pandemic, Google Hangouts, Hyperloop, meme stock, Menlo Park, payment for order flow, Pershing Square Capital Management, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, security theater, short selling, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social distancing, Tesla Model S, too big to fail, Two Sigma, value at risk, wealth creators

By the end of the week, even Angie, her biggest supporter, who had been so proud that Kim was part of what was going on with GameStop, had been telling her she needed to take what profits she’d made and get out. And yet somehow, Kim just couldn’t sell. Even as the stock continued to fall, that very morning—she still couldn’t force herself to dump her GME. After Angie had dropped her off at the airport and she’d worked her way through the security theater—and the additional Covid double encore—she’d paused at the gate to call Chinwe, her work husband, because like a real husband and wife, they always liked to call each other before and after flights. To her surprise, he hadn’t immediately jumped on her with comments about Goliath or David; but the quiet on the other end of the line made her feel even more foolish somehow.

The Complacent Class: The Self-Defeating Quest for the American Dream by Tyler Cowen

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alvin Roth, assortative mating, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, bike sharing, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, business climate, business cycle, circulation of elites, classic study, clean water, David Graeber, declining real wages, deindustrialization, desegregation, digital divide, Donald Trump, driverless car, drone strike, East Village, Elon Musk, Ferguson, Missouri, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, gentrification, gig economy, Google Glasses, Hyman Minsky, Hyperloop, income inequality, intangible asset, Internet of things, inventory management, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, medical residency, meta-analysis, obamacare, offshore financial centre, Paradox of Choice, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, Richard Florida, security theater, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, South China Sea, Steven Pinker, Stuxnet, The Great Moderation, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, total factor productivity, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, upwardly mobile, Vilfredo Pareto, working-age population, World Values Survey

The most famous source of these bombings was the radical group the Weather Underground, but other bombers included anti–Vietnam War groups, student radicals, fighters for racial justice, and Puerto Rican independence groups, with plenty of amateur, homemade bombs circulating at the time. Yet it’s today, and not back then, when the “security theater” to protect against bombs is so intense.1 And don’t forget the riots. Starting with the 1965 Watts clashes in Los Angeles, the country faced a wave of intensely violent and often out-of-control social unrest. A police chief from the time remarked: “This situation is very much like fighting the Viet Cong … We haven’t the slightest idea when this can be brought under control.”

When to Rob a Bank: ...And 131 More Warped Suggestions and Well-Intended Rants by Steven D. Levitt, Stephen J. Dubner

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbus A320, airport security, augmented reality, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Black Swan, Broken windows theory, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, carbon tax, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deliberate practice, feminist movement, food miles, George Akerlof, global pandemic, information asymmetry, invisible hand, loss aversion, mental accounting, Netflix Prize, obamacare, oil shale / tar sands, Pareto efficiency, peak oil, pre–internet, price anchoring, price discrimination, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, Richard Thaler, Sam Peltzman, security theater, sugar pill, Ted Kaczynski, the built environment, The Chicago School, the High Line, Thorstein Veblen, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, US Airways Flight 1549

And if Secretary LaHood has any interest in pursuing any of these avenues, I stand at the ready to offer whatever help that I can. Update: Secretary LaHood never did take me up on my offer to help. Security Overkill, Diaper-Changing Edition (SJD) I’ve been thinking a bit lately about security overkill. This includes not just the notion of “security theater,” but the many instances in which someone places a layer of security between me and my everyday activities with no apparent benefit. My bank, for instance, would surely argue that its many and various anti-fraud measures are valuable. But in truth, they are a) meant to protect the bank, not me; and b) cumbersome to the point of ridiculous.

How to Speak Money: What the Money People Say--And What It Really Means by John Lanchester

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, asset allocation, Basel III, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bitcoin, Black Swan, blood diamond, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, commoditize, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, Dava Sobel, David Graeber, disintermediation, double entry bookkeeping, en.wikipedia.org, estate planning, fear index, financial engineering, financial innovation, Flash crash, forward guidance, Garrett Hardin, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, high net worth, High speed trading, hindsight bias, hype cycle, income inequality, inflation targeting, interest rate swap, inverted yield curve, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, John Perry Barlow, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, junk bonds, Kodak vs Instagram, Kondratiev cycle, Large Hadron Collider, liquidity trap, London Interbank Offered Rate, London Whale, loss aversion, low interest rates, margin call, McJob, means of production, microcredit, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, negative equity, neoliberal agenda, New Urbanism, Nick Leeson, Nikolai Kondratiev, Nixon shock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open economy, paradox of thrift, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, precautionary principle, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, random walk, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Feynman, Right to Buy, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Satoshi Nakamoto, security theater, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, survivorship bias, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tragedy of the Commons, trickle-down economics, two and twenty, Two Sigma, Tyler Cowen, Washington Consensus, wealth creators, working poor, yield curve

I’m completely terrified of flying—when I say “terrified,” I mean I can’t get on a plane unless I’m zonked on prescription tranquilizers. But even I can see that that’s an irrational fear, because contemporary commercial aviation is extraordinarily, uncannily safe. The experience of flying is so ghastly—the nasty airports, the multiple queueing, the intelligence-insulting security theater, the cattle-car in-flight conditions—that we tend to forget what an astonishing success the air industry has made of its safety record. Do we even notice? No, not really—what we notice are the crashes. Maybe the story of aid is a bit like that. If 16,438 children died today in a single disaster, it would dominate every news media outlet in the world for weeks.

How Music Got Free: The End of an Industry, the Turn of the Century, and the Patient Zero of Piracy by Stephen Witt

4chan, Alan Greenspan, AOL-Time Warner, autism spectrum disorder, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, big-box store, cloud computing, collaborative economy, company town, crowdsourcing, Eben Moglen, game design, hype cycle, Internet Archive, invention of movable type, inventory management, iterative process, Jason Scott: textfiles.com, job automation, late fees, mental accounting, moral panic, operational security, packet switching, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, pirate software, reality distortion field, Ronald Reagan, security theater, sharing economy, side project, Silicon Valley, software patent, Stephen Fry, Steve Jobs, Tipper Gore, zero day

And then, without further inspection, the guard just waved him through. They hadn’t made him take off his boots. They hadn’t patted him down or asked him any difficult questions. He had set off the wand, and there were no consequences. At that moment, Glover realized that the wandings were performatory. This wasn’t security, but security theater, a pantomime intended to intimidate would-be thieves rather than catch actual smugglers. And the low-wage security guards who ran the daily showings were just as bored of them as everybody else. If Glover could somehow fit the compact discs inside of his boots, he could finally get them out on his own.

Fuller Memorandum by Stross, Charles

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Beeching cuts, Bletchley Park, British Empire, carbon credits, cognitive dissonance, complexity theory, congestion charging, Crossrail, death from overwork, dumpster diving, escalation ladder, false flag, finite state, Firefox, Herman Kahn, HyperCard, invisible hand, land reform, linear programming, messenger bag, MITM: man-in-the-middle, operational security, peak oil, Plato's cave, post-work, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, quantum entanglement, reality distortion field, security theater, sensible shoes, side project, Sloane Ranger, telemarketer, Turing machine

The feeders raised just about everything that wasn't totally dismembered and disarticulated. In the end, they had to bring in bulldozers and dig trenches. They identified some of the cultists--but not Jonquil the Sloane Ranger, or her boyfriend Julian. I don't think Brookwood will reopen for a long time. Brains has been given a good talking-to, and is being subjected to the Security Theater Special Variety Show for breaching about sixteen different regulations by installing beta software on an employee's personal phone. Reminding Oscar-Oscar that if he hadn't done so they'd have lost the Eater of Souls to a cultist infiltrator appears to be futile. Right now, everyone in Admin has joined in the world's biggest arse-kicking circle dance, except possibly for Angleton, who is shielding me from the worst of it.

Wireless by Charles Stross

air gap, anthropic principle, back-to-the-land, Benoit Mandelbrot, Buckminster Fuller, Cepheid variable, cognitive dissonance, colonial exploitation, cosmic microwave background, Easter island, epigenetics, finite state, Georg Cantor, gravity well, hive mind, hydroponic farming, jitney, Khyber Pass, Late Heavy Bombardment, launch on warning, lifelogging, Magellanic Cloud, mandelbrot fractal, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Neil Armstrong, peak oil, phenotype, Pluto: dwarf planet, security theater, sensible shoes, Turing machine, undersea cable

Or worse, when the Opposition raise their snouts.” “But I—” Pierce stopped, collected his thoughts, and continued. “I thought that never happened? That the self-policing thing was a, an adequate safeguard?” “Lad.” Kafka shook his head. “You clearly mean well. And self-policing does indeed work adequately most of the time. But don’t let the security theater at your graduation deceive you: there are failure modes. We set you a large number of surveillance assignments to muddy the water—palimpsests all, of course, we overwrite them once they deliver their reports so that future-you retains no memory of them—but you can’t watch yourself all the time.

Culture & Empire: Digital Revolution by Pieter Hintjens

4chan, Aaron Swartz, airport security, AltaVista, anti-communist, anti-pattern, barriers to entry, Bill Duvall, bitcoin, blockchain, Boeing 747, bread and circuses, business climate, business intelligence, business process, Chelsea Manning, clean water, commoditize, congestion charging, Corn Laws, correlation does not imply causation, cryptocurrency, Debian, decentralized internet, disinformation, Edward Snowden, failed state, financial independence, Firefox, full text search, gamification, German hyperinflation, global village, GnuPG, Google Chrome, greed is good, Hernando de Soto, hiring and firing, independent contractor, informal economy, intangible asset, invisible hand, it's over 9,000, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Rulifson, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Laura Poitras, M-Pesa, mass immigration, mass incarceration, mega-rich, military-industrial complex, MITM: man-in-the-middle, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, national security letter, Nelson Mandela, new economy, New Urbanism, no silver bullet, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, packet switching, patent troll, peak oil, power law, pre–internet, private military company, race to the bottom, real-name policy, rent-seeking, reserve currency, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, Ross Ulbricht, Russell Brand, Satoshi Nakamoto, security theater, selection bias, Skype, slashdot, software patent, spectrum auction, Steve Crocker, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stuxnet, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, trade route, transaction costs, twin studies, union organizing, wealth creators, web application, WikiLeaks, Y2K, zero day, Zipf's Law

Most people are pretty lonely, and the idea that someone is watching isn't half as scary as the alternative -- that no one cares. This is why many people enjoy getting some spam. It may be junk, yet at least it's coming to us, personally. We calculate that it doesn't really matter. We tolerate the cameras and spying because we know it's security theater, and we're not really that dumb to take it seriously, even if we like to pretend we are. TV taught us that privacy is a bauble to be traded for a few drops of fame. Tell the world your most intimate details, and become a star for 15 seconds. Famous people don't have privacy. Why should the rest of us need it?

Click Here to Kill Everybody: Security and Survival in a Hyper-Connected World by Bruce Schneier

23andMe, 3D printing, air gap, algorithmic bias, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Brian Krebs, business process, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, cognitive bias, computer vision, connected car, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Heinemeier Hansson, disinformation, Donald Trump, driverless car, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, end-to-end encryption, fault tolerance, Firefox, Flash crash, George Akerlof, incognito mode, industrial robot, information asymmetry, information security, Internet of things, invention of radio, job automation, job satisfaction, John Gilmore, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, license plate recognition, loose coupling, market design, medical malpractice, Minecraft, MITM: man-in-the-middle, move fast and break things, national security letter, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, NSO Group, pattern recognition, precautionary principle, printed gun, profit maximization, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, ransomware, real-name policy, Rodney Brooks, Ross Ulbricht, security theater, self-driving car, Seymour Hersh, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart transportation, Snapchat, sparse data, Stanislav Petrov, Stephen Hawking, Stuxnet, supply-chain attack, surveillance capitalism, The Market for Lemons, Timothy McVeigh, too big to fail, Uber for X, Unsafe at Any Speed, uranium enrichment, Valery Gerasimov, Wayback Machine, web application, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler, zero day

Bruce Schneier (13 Jun 2008), “The psychology of security,” AfricaCrypt 2008, https://www.schneier.com/academic/archives/2008/01/the_psychology_of_se.html. 96I coined the term in 2005: Bruce Schneier (8 Sep 2005), “Terrorists don’t do movie plots,” Wired, http://www.wired.com/2005/09/terrorists-dont-do-movie-plots. 96One: we are a species of storytellers: Bruce Schneier (31 Jul 2012), “Drawing the wrong lessons from horrific events,” CNN, http://www.cnn.com/2012/07/31/opinion/schneier-aurora-aftermath/index.html. 96And two: it makes no sense: Bruce Schneier (Nov 2009), “Beyond security theater,” New Internationalist, https://www.schneier.com/essays/archives/2009/11/beyond_security_thea.html. PART II: THE SOLUTIONS 100Today, spam still constitutes: Statista (Oct 2017), “Global spam volume as percentage of total e-mail traffic from January 2014 to September 2017, by month,” https://www.statista.com/statistics/420391/spam-email-traffic-share. 100but 99.99% of it is blocked: Jordan Robertson (19 Jan 2016), “E-mail spam goes artisanal,” Bloomberg, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-01-19/e-mail-spam-goes-artisanal. 100The EU’s Payment Services Directives: Steven J.

Apollo's Arrow: The Profound and Enduring Impact of Coronavirus on the Way We Live by Nicholas A. Christakis

agricultural Revolution, Anthropocene, Atul Gawande, Boris Johnson, butterfly effect, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, classic study, clean water, Columbian Exchange, contact tracing, contact tracing app, coronavirus, COVID-19, dark matter, data science, death of newspapers, disinformation, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Edward Jenner, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, George Floyd, global pandemic, global supply chain, helicopter parent, Henri Poincaré, high-speed rail, income inequality, invention of agriculture, invisible hand, it's over 9,000, job satisfaction, lockdown, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, mass incarceration, medical residency, meta-analysis, New Journalism, randomized controlled trial, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, school choice, security theater, social contagion, social distancing, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, the scientific method, trade route, Upton Sinclair, zoonotic diseases

One formal model that evaluated what would happen if all airplane flights were canceled on the thirtieth day after the onset of a pandemic (which would actually be incredibly speedy) concluded that, even if 99.9 percent of all flights were canceled, it would postpone the peak attack of a moderately transmissible disease (with an R0 of 1.7) by just forty-two days.47 Restrictions on internal air travel in a country like the United States are relatively ineffective given how much road travel there is. Attempts by state governors in late March 2020 to close their borders to other states, in addition to being constitutionally suspect, seemed mainly a kind of security theater. When the governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis, suggested that individuals with New York State plates be stopped at the border, it was viewed by many as simply an effort to shift responsibility for the pathogen onto outsiders. This may be a common political way of coping with pandemic disease, but it makes no public health sense.

Liars and Outliers: How Security Holds Society Together by Bruce Schneier

Abraham Maslow, airport security, Alvin Toffler, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Brian Krebs, Broken windows theory, carried interest, Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, commoditize, corporate governance, crack epidemic, credit crunch, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Graeber, desegregation, don't be evil, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, Douglas Hofstadter, Dunbar number, experimental economics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, Future Shock, Garrett Hardin, George Akerlof, hydraulic fracturing, impulse control, income inequality, information security, invention of agriculture, invention of gunpowder, iterative process, Jean Tirole, John Bogle, John Nash: game theory, joint-stock company, Julian Assange, language acquisition, longitudinal study, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, microcredit, mirror neurons, moral hazard, Multics, mutually assured destruction, Nate Silver, Network effects, Nick Leeson, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, Oklahoma City bombing, patent troll, phenotype, pre–internet, principal–agent problem, prisoner's dilemma, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Recombinant DNA, rent-seeking, RFID, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Ronald Coase, security theater, shareholder value, slashdot, statistical model, Steven Pinker, Stuxnet, technological singularity, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Timothy McVeigh, too big to fail, traffic fines, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, ultimatum game, UNCLOS, union organizing, Vernor Vinge, WikiLeaks, World Values Survey, Y2K, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game

Jeffrey Conklin (2006), Dialog Mapping: Building a Shared Understanding of Wicked Problems, John Wiley & Sons. ubiquity of data Charles Stross (2011), “Network Security in the Medium Term, 2061–2561 AD,” paper presented at USENIX Security. better off spending Bruce Schneier (2009), “Beyond Security Theater,” New Internationalist, 427:10–13. Yochai Benkler Yochai Benkler (2011), The Penguin and the Leviathan: How Cooperation Trumphs Over Self-Interest, Crown Business, 25–6. security is a process Bruce Schneier (2000), Secrets and Lies: Digital Security in a Networked World, John Wiley & Sons, 273, 395.

The Controlled Demolition of the American Empire by Jeff Berwick, Charlie Robinson

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, airport security, Alan Greenspan, American Legislative Exchange Council, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, bank run, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, British Empire, call centre, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, Comet Ping Pong, coronavirus, Corrections Corporation of America, COVID-19, crack epidemic, crisis actor, crony capitalism, cryptocurrency, dark matter, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, energy transition, epigenetics, failed state, fake news, false flag, Ferguson, Missouri, fiat currency, financial independence, George Floyd, global pandemic, global supply chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, illegal immigration, Indoor air pollution, information security, interest rate swap, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, lockdown, Mahatma Gandhi, mandatory minimum, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, megacity, microapartment, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, new economy, no-fly zone, offshore financial centre, Oklahoma City bombing, open borders, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pill mill, planetary scale, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, power law, pre–internet, private military company, Project for a New American Century, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, reserve currency, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Saturday Night Live, security theater, self-driving car, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, South China Sea, stock buybacks, surveillance capitalism, too big to fail, unpaid internship, urban decay, WikiLeaks, working poor

Kiriakou did time in a federal prison where he had to sit at the Aryan Brotherhood’s table during meals so that he would not get shanked or worse. This is serious business. Manning, Snowden, McGovern, Drake, and Binney were not protected by the Whistleblower Protection Enhancement Act, so it is not really “protection”, it is all just an “act” This is what is called “security theater”, or the perception that there are protections in place. The name says “Whistleblower Protection Act” so it must protect whistleblowers, right? Does the “Patriot Act” protect patriots? Does the National Defense Authorization Act actually defend the nation? Is the Federal Reserve Bank federal, or does it have any reserves?

A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles

Anton Chekhov, glass ceiling, security theater, stakhanovite

(The officers also endeavored to speak with the hotel’s manager, only to find that he had not yet reported to work—a fact that was duly noted in his file!) At one o’clock, two additional KGB men were summoned so that a more thorough search could be made of the hotel. At two, the senior officer conducting the investigation was encouraged to speak with Vasily, the concierge. Finding him at his desk in the lobby (where he was in the midst of securing theater tickets for a guest), the officer did not beat about the bush. He put his question to the concierge unambiguously: “Do you know the whereabouts of Alexander Rostov?” To which the concierge replied: “I haven’t the slightest idea.” Having learned that both Manager Leplevsky and Headwaiter Rostov had gone missing, Chef Zhukovsky and Maître d’ Duras convened at 2:15 for their daily meeting in the chef’s office, where they immediately engaged in close conversation.

Future Crimes: Everything Is Connected, Everyone Is Vulnerable and What We Can Do About It by Marc Goodman

23andMe, 3D printing, active measures, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, airport security, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, Alvin Toffler, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, Bill Joy: nanobots, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, borderless world, Boston Dynamics, Brian Krebs, business process, butterfly effect, call centre, Charles Lindbergh, Chelsea Manning, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, Cody Wilson, cognitive dissonance, computer vision, connected car, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data acquisition, data is the new oil, data science, Dean Kamen, deep learning, DeepMind, digital rights, disinformation, disintermediation, Dogecoin, don't be evil, double helix, Downton Abbey, driverless car, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Flash crash, Free Software Foundation, future of work, game design, gamification, global pandemic, Google Chrome, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Gordon Gekko, Hacker News, high net worth, High speed trading, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, hypertext link, illegal immigration, impulse control, industrial robot, information security, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Harrison: Longitude, John Markoff, Joi Ito, Jony Ive, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, Kuwabatake Sanjuro: assassination market, Large Hadron Collider, Larry Ellison, Laura Poitras, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lean Startup, license plate recognition, lifelogging, litecoin, low earth orbit, M-Pesa, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, MITM: man-in-the-middle, mobile money, more computing power than Apollo, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, national security letter, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, obamacare, Occupy movement, Oculus Rift, off grid, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, operational security, optical character recognition, Parag Khanna, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, personalized medicine, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, printed gun, RAND corporation, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, refrigerator car, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rodney Brooks, Ross Ulbricht, Russell Brand, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, security theater, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, SimCity, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, Snapchat, social graph, SoftBank, software as a service, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strong AI, Stuxnet, subscription business, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, tech worker, technological singularity, TED Talk, telepresence, telepresence robot, Tesla Model S, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, uranium enrichment, Virgin Galactic, Wall-E, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Wave and Pay, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, web application, Westphalian system, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, you are the product, zero day

In response to the creativity (albeit diabolical) demonstrated by the terrorists who carried out the 9/11 plot, the government spent billions of dollars and came up with such “innovations” as the Transportation Security Administration. Though frisking four-year-olds and little old ladies in wheelchairs makes for fine “security theater,” we’re going to have to significantly up our game if we hope to prevent future terrorist attacks. Given the pace of technological change, tomorrow’s security threats will not look like those of today—one of the reasons government is struggling mightily in the face of our common cyber insecurity.

An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood by Neal Gabler

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, centralized clearinghouse, Charles Lindbergh, company town, half of the world's population has never made a phone call, haute couture, Louis Pasteur, Norman Mailer, power law, security theater, Upton Sinclair, working poor

With Waddill Catchings’s encouragement, Harry Warner now acted boldly. By 1930 he had increased the company’s assets to $230 million, bankrolling part of the new investment with a $5 million personal loan. Some of this went toward converting the Warners studios into a complete sound facility. More went toward securing theaters to show the movies and compete with the industry’s giants. First, Harry bought the Stanley Company, which not only had 250 theaters but also held a one-third interest in First National, one of Hollywood’s so-called Big Five. With this share he went after First National itself, buying another third outright and getting the final third from William Fox, who was conducting his own fire sale to cover his debts in the ill-fated takeover of MGM.

The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined by Steven Pinker

1960s counterculture, affirmative action, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, availability heuristic, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, Bonfire of the Vanities, book value, bread and circuses, British Empire, Broken windows theory, business cycle, California gold rush, Cass Sunstein, citation needed, classic study, clean water, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, Columbine, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, confounding variable, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, crack epidemic, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Brooks, delayed gratification, demographic transition, desegregation, Doomsday Clock, Douglas Hofstadter, Dr. Strangelove, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, experimental subject, facts on the ground, failed state, first-past-the-post, Flynn Effect, food miles, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, fudge factor, full employment, Garrett Hardin, George Santayana, ghettoisation, Gini coefficient, global village, Golden arches theory, Great Leap Forward, Henri Poincaré, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, high-speed rail, Hobbesian trap, humanitarian revolution, impulse control, income inequality, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, lake wobegon effect, libertarian paternalism, long peace, longitudinal study, loss aversion, Marshall McLuhan, mass incarceration, McMansion, means of production, mental accounting, meta-analysis, Mikhail Gorbachev, mirror neurons, moral panic, mutually assured destruction, Nelson Mandela, nuclear taboo, Oklahoma City bombing, open economy, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Singer: altruism, power law, QWERTY keyboard, race to the bottom, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, Republic of Letters, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Saturday Night Live, security theater, Skinner box, Skype, Slavoj Žižek, South China Sea, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stanford prison experiment, statistical model, stem cell, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, sunk-cost fallacy, technological determinism, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, the long tail, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Timothy McVeigh, Tragedy of the Commons, transatlantic slave trade, trolley problem, Turing machine, twin studies, ultimatum game, uranium enrichment, Vilfredo Pareto, Walter Mischel, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

Experts proclaimed that terrorism made the United States “vulnerable” and “fragile,” and that it threatened to do away with the “ascendancy of the modern state,” “our way of life,” or “civilization itself.”179 In a 2005 essay in The Atlantic, for example, a former White House counterterrorism official confidently prophesied that by the tenth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks the American economy would be shut down by chronic bombings of casinos, subways, and shopping malls, the regular downing of commercial airliners by shoulder-launched missiles, and acts of cataclysmic sabotage at chemical plants.180 The massive bureaucracy of the Department of Homeland Security was created overnight to reassure the nation with such security theater as color-coded terrorist alerts, advisories to stock up on plastic sheeting and duct tape, obsessive checking of identification cards (despite fakes being so plentiful that George W. Bush’s own daughter was arrested for using one to order a margarita), the confiscation of nail clippers at airports, the girding of rural post offices with concrete barriers, and the designation of eighty thousand locations as “potential terrorist targets,” including Weeki Wachee Springs, a Florida tourist trap in which comely women dressed as mermaids swim around in large glass tanks.