Bruce Schneier is a security expert, but not in the standard sense of someone who advocates for more security, all the time, at any cost, in order to increase demand for their consulting services. His background is computing cryptography although he now works mostly in physical-world issues. He approaches the topic of security from an atypically holistic perspective, trying to balance real societal benefits with real societal costs. I’m not always convinced by everything he says, but he’s remarkably convincing most of the time.

There are also a number of interesting facts about Bruce Schneier which can be found at schneierfacts.com. For instance, “Bruce Schneier writes his books and essays by generating random alphanumeric text of an appropriate length and then decrypting it”. I did not know that.

Last night he was on CBC’s As It Happens, talking about airport and non-airport security in light of the Christmas-day plane bombing attempt in the US. In the Canada in my mind, this is the kind of careful, outcomes-oriented discussion we have around significant topics like counter-terrorism. One of my favourite remarks: he’s angry that the shoe-bomber failed to bomb but succeeded in creating terror anyway. He would like a security perspective where even if attacks occasionally succeed, they failed to produce terror, instead of the other way around.

The audio for last night’s As It Happens is available on the episode page. Alternatively, here’s a direct link to the .wmv audio file for the first part of the show. Schneier is the first interview. There’s also plenty of interesting discourse in the blog posts he’s written since the bomb attempt.