Bruce Schneier On the Mirage of Security

Take Aways

There were some interesting things that I found were very untouched on. He illustrated that every day we make tradeoffs with our own security in mind. We quickly balance the price/ risks and make a snap decision on how that will affect our actions. According to Schneier these decisions are mostly based off our sense of security as opposed to the real level of security. Also these decisions are subconscious for the most part and a large part of being a human so very few people think about these decisions as they are doing them. But there is one thing that mediates between our feelings and reality and that is a model. This made me see how much people look to the people and things around them when making decisions for their own safety and how scary this could be if the model is far from the reality of security. But Schneier says that the model will typically follow the real level of security closer than people’s feelings so if people take the model into account then their feeling of security will be closer to the reality of security. Because people will always be able to see their perceived security and never be able to see the real security but if they can look at the model of security then they will be much closer to how truly secure they are.

Speaking/Presenting Techniques

In my opinion Schneier had some of the blandest speaking techniques of all of the TED Talks yet far. He stood on the stage and kind of walked in a disorienting circle while speaking in monotone his speech with his eyes on the floor and occasionally looking past the audience into the back of the room. He did not put any slides up on the screen to help illustrate his speech so I constantly had to pause and rewind the video to understand what he was saying. He also didn’t come back to what he had stated earlier so it was hard to connect all of his ideas together.

Application to Education/Me

This applies to almost every student in the United States because the false sense of security is within each student but the teacher is like the model because they know what the world is like. Students don’t know if they really are secure because school is like a little world but the world changes constantly around it.

Connection

This is very similar to Little Brother and 1984 because the citizens felt secure in the grasp of the government and were too naïve to see that the real threat was the government themselves. In Schneier’s video he also mentioned that people fear the rare threat and this can cause them to overlook the common threats that are more serious in their everyday lives. For example lots of people are afraid of flying but aren’t afraid of driving. Driving is statistically more dangerous than flying but it isn’t common to people so they fear it. This can be seen in 1984 because the people are scared of whoever is attacking Oceania but in doing so overlook the oppression of their government for the most part.