Bruce Schneier

In his 2020 book, “ Future Politics , ” British barrister Jamie Susskind wrote that the dominant question of the 20th century was “How much of our collective life should be determined by the state, and what should be left to the market and civil society?” But in the early decades of this century, Susskind suggested that we face a different question: “To what extent should our lives be directed and controlled by powerful digital systems—and on what terms?” Artificial intelligence (AI) forces us …

This is crazy. Lawmakers in several US states are contemplating banning VPNs , because…think of the children! As of this writing, Wisconsin lawmakers are escalating their war on privacy by targeting VPNs in the name of “protecting children” in A.B. 105 / S.B. 130 . It’s an age verification bill that requires all websites distributing material that could conceivably be deemed “sexual content” to both implement an age verification system and also to block the access of users connected via VPN. Th…

A meter-long flying neon squid ( Ommastrephes bartramii ) was found dead on an Israeli beach. The species is rare in the Mediterranean.

In a new paper, “ Adversarial Poetry as a Universal Single-Turn Jailbreak Mechanism in Large Language Models ,” researchers found that turning LLM prompts into poetry resulted in jailbreaking the models: Abstract : We present evidence that adversarial poetry functions as a universal single-turn jailbreak technique for Large Language Models (LLMs). Across 25 frontier proprietary and open-weight models, curated poetic prompts yielded high attack-success rates (ASR), with some providers exceeding …

This quote is from House of Huawei: The Secret History of China’s Most Powerful Company . “Long before anyone had heard of Ren Zhengfei or Huawei, Wan Runnan had been China’s star entrepreneur in the 1980s, with his company, the Stone Group, touted as “China’s IBM.” Wan had believed that economic change could lead to political change. He had thrown his support behind the pro-democracy protesters in 1989. As a result, he had to flee to France, with an arrest warrant hanging over his head. He was…

Democracy is colliding with the technologies of artificial intelligence. Judging from the audience reaction at the recent World Forum on Democracy in Strasbourg, the general expectation is that democracy will be the worse for it. We have another narrative. Yes, there are risks to democracy from AI, but there are also opportunities. We have just published the book Rewiring Democracy: How AI will Transform Politics, Government, and Citizenship . In it, we take a clear-eyed view of how AI is under…

The International Association of Cryptologic Research—the academic cryptography association that’s been putting conferences like Crypto (back when “crypto” meant “cryptography”) and Eurocrypt since the 1980s—had to nullify an online election when trustee Moti Yung lost his decryption key. For this election and in accordance with the bylaws of the IACR, the three members of the IACR 2025 Election Committee acted as independent trustees, each holding a portion of the cryptographic key material re…

I did not know Adidas sold a sneaker called “ Squid .” As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven’t covered. Blog moderation policy.

It’s been a month since Rewiring Democracy: How AI Will Transform Our Politics, Government, and Citizenship was published. From what we know, sales are good. Some of the book’s forty-three chapters are available online: chapters 2 , 12 , 28 , 34 , 38 , and 41 . We need more reviews—six on Amazon is not enough , and no one has yet posted a viral TikTok review. One review was published in Nature and another on the RSA Conference website , but more would be better. If you’ve read the book, please …