Homeland Insecurity

from the unintended-consequences dept

Ian sent me this article last night, and it took me until this morning to finally finish reading it. It's a very long, but completely fascinating article from the Atlantic about Bruce Schneier's opinions about how our current "homeland security" attempts are likely to make the country less secure. If you've seen Schneier speak recently or read what he writes none of this will come as a surprise to you. However, the article does tie together a lot of what he's said into one complete article about the unintended consequences of technology-only solutions. While many technology-based security systems sound good at first, they lead to unintended consequences that actually make security much worse - for example, by creating a single point of failure that (if breached) makes things even worse than they would be with no security measure. Absolutely worth reading, though, I wonder how many people who actually need to read it ever will.