Beyond Fear: Thinking Sensibly About Security in an Uncertain World. | 
| Author: Bruce Schneier
Publisher: Springer
Category: Book
List Price: $25.00
Buy Used: $5.94
You Save: $19.06 (76%)
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Avg. Customer Rating:  45 reviews
Sales Rank: 24285
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 295
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.4
Dimensions (in): 9.3 x 6 x 1.3
ISBN: 0387026207
Dewey Decimal Number: 363.32
EAN: 9780387026206
Publication Date: May 4, 2003
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Product Description
In "Beyond Fear," Bruce Schneier invites us to take a critical look at not just the threats to our security, but the ways in which we're encouraged to think about security by law enforcement agencies, businesses of all shapes and sizes, and our national governments and militaries. Schneier believes we all can and should be better security consumers, and that the trade-offs we make in the name of security - in terms of cash outlays, taxes, inconvenience, and diminished freedoms - should be part of an ongoing negotiation in our personal, professional, and civic lives, and the subject of an open and informed national discussion.
With a well-deserved reputation for original and sometimes iconoclastic thought, Schneier has a lot to say that is provocative, counter-intuitive, and just plain good sense. He explains in detail, for example, why we need to design security systems that don't just work well, but fail well, and why secrecy on the part of government often undermines security. A skeptic of much that's promised by highly touted technologies like biometrics, Schneier is also a refreshingly positive, problem-solving force in the often self-dramatizing and fear-mongering world of security pundits.
Schneier helps the reader to understand the issues at stake, and how to best come to one's own conclusions, including the vast infrastructure we already have in place, and the vaster systems--some useful, others useless or worse--that we're being asked to submit to and pay for.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 40 more reviews...
 Great read June 14, 2008
Nutshell review - A great read. Entertaining and informative. So well written and very useful at the same time.
Useful tool for executives April 3, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
I was pretty excited to read Bruce Schneier's Beyond Fear, I have enjoyed hearning him speak and like his blog. I will say that the book could have said what it says with a lot less pages, possibly even an essay. However, there are lots of great stories and a fantastic word picture called "Security Theater". His illustration is that after 9/11 no one knew what to do to combat air terrorism, so they gave the appearance of action by doing things like confiscating nail files. Oh do I agree that much of what we see is security theater!
Bruce has a five step process he tries to illustrate, especially in the second half of the book:
* What assets are you trying to protect?
* What are the risks to these assets? ( I think threats is a more correct word than risks )
* How well does the security solution mitigate those risks?
* What other risks does the security solution cause?
* What trade-offs does the security solution require?
This is a nice implementation of threat vector analysis and he tells great stories. I am not sure the book teaches that much, but it might be a valuable awareness tool for executives.
 Security fundamentals - well written January 17, 2008
Beyond Fear is a well-written book on the fundamental concepts and applications of security theory. In the first chapter, he proposes a sequence of five questions that should be asked about any suggested security system.
1.What assets are you trying to protect?
2.What are the risks to those assets?
3.How well does the security solution mitigate the risks?
4.What other risks does the security solution cause?
5.What costs and trade-offs does the security solution impose?
He spends the rest of the book discussing various aspects of security, and talking about various implementations of security both historical and modern. He finished writing this book in 2003, so there are many references to the 9-11 incidents and the security activities implemented because of them.
Reading it improves the reader security intelligence July 5, 2007
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
The content of this book slightly overlap the content of the author previous book Secrets and Lies: Digital Security in a Networked World but presents the material with a different angle. An angle with the perspective of a security expert that witness security measures taken by governments in reaction of the 9/11 terrorism attack and wants people to understand the absurdity of some of these measures.
It is not technical at all and does not necessitate any particular background to understand and enjoy. The author explains clearly how to make a risk assessment of something that you want to make more secure and then evaluate the cost of the security measures. Only when you have that data, you can evaluate if the added security is worth it.
These explanations are backed up with concrete examples such as evaluating the risk to make purchase with a credit card over the internet. Other examples include the absurdity of securing a lunch in a company refrigerator because the potential loss if having a lunch stolen does not justify securing it. The author also explains that even with technologies that looks very accurate such as facial recognition with an error rate of, let's say, 0.0001 % are totally ineffective when they have to control a huge number of persons like a stadium crowd because even with this accuracy, they would create an unmanageable amount of false positive alerts.
The author also elaborate about why you should question the motivation of a security provider when it is a third party and link this with how people fears can be exploited to introduce invasive, excessively expensive and inefficient security measures. I think that the goal of the author was to make people more critics about security questions and my opinion is that his goal has been successfully achieved.
Sensible security for an unsensible world June 5, 2007
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
Most people think that they think rationally about security decisions.
Most don't even know when they're making security decisions.
Fewer know what those decisions really entail.
Only Bruce Schneier knows how to make those decisions sensibly, and he's passing that information along to the world.
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