(L-R) Bruce Schneier, Mark Cuban, Cory Doctorow, the copyleftists and crypto kids. Photo by eschipul, 2007.
Bruce Schneier has been let go of BT (British Telecom) and I can only say: good!
My saying this is "good" isn't about someone losing his livelihood -- because with all his lectures, books, consulting and past lucrative appoinments he isn't hurting for cash, and Pierre Omidyar will probably snatch him up for his new game-world Newco. That's because nowadays, for the media ervolution, geeks and cryptologists are actually more important than old-fashioned journalists for publication managers and owners whose main content consists of stolen classified documents.
No, my saying "good" is because this helps isolate Schneier further on the radical left rather than continuing the fiction that he is somehow some mainstream corporate guru on security, part of some weird but accepted establishment.
He's not. He's never been about corporate security, really. So many of his blogs in fact are just the opposite, about casual tolerance of hackers. In fact, like a lot of things in our day (Snowden), he's about encryption, i.e. the struggle for power.
Schneier just hasn't been able to stop himself from going even more rogue since Snowden, and joined Electronic Frontier Foundation to openly wage warfare on copyright and national security in the name of absolute encryption privileges for his anarchist collective to do whatever they like.
Schneier is described as a "futurologist" at BT, a word that most of Silicon Valley, briefly enamored with this term earlier in this century, seem to have dropped. Mainly, I see him very much a figure of the past -- the technocommunism, the collectivism, the undermining of the liberal state in a civil society, the utopianism, and so on. These are all throwbacks, not cutting edge. But the battle is for real -- lately, the technocommunists and technolibertarans are battling each other even more than us.
As I explained, when I directly challenged Schneier in person at his public lecture afterwards about the implications of absolute encryption, he dismissed the concern about absolute encryption and said "there will always be bad guys" and couldn't seem to explain how law enforcement would chase them if there were absolute encryption -- which he advocated.
Naturally the geek squad is discussing this dismissal assuming with paranoid bravado that it's about his radical blogs on the NSA and GQHC as if "fighting the Man" is the preferred activity. BT denies this, but of course that *is* what it's about -- his embrace of the radical, even loony edge of the open source anarchist coder movement. He himself has a sneaky veneer of pretense that it isn't about this.
Yet given that BT is accused of putting in the back doors (see the story below), it's no surprise they've parted ways. BTW, I don't believe he or Greenwald supplied adequate proof of this alleged undermining of encryption or of insertion of back doors.
His fanboyz gush and claim that The Man was always out to get him, and that's why you gotta Fight the Man.
Mkay. Get him!
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