Unit 6
How David Eaves teaches Unit 6 (part 1)
Guest Lecture - Bruce Schneier
What is this page?
This is a detailed breakdown of how David Eaves, a Lecturer at the University College London's Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose (UCL IIPP), teaches the contents of Unit 6 of the open access syllabus developed by Teaching Public Service in the Digital Age. Read how part two of Unit 6 is taught here.
This page contains a summary of a presentation by Bruce Schneier, American cryptographer, computer security and privacy expert, and a Lecturer in Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School. The presentation took place in fall of 2020 and given to students enrolled in David Eaves' "DPI-662 Digital Government: Technology, Policy, and Public Service Innovation" at the Harvard Kennedy School, where David taught for eight years.
We believe presenting diverse ways to teach the syllabus will help others adopt and teach the material in various contexts.
Who is this page for?
This page was developed for university faculty who teach public administrators or master's levels students in public policy and public administration. This material may also be suitable for teaching to upper year undergraduates.
Guest Lecture Overview
Bruce Schneier is the author of several books, including the 2014 New York Times best seller Data and Goliath, and *Click Here To Kill Everybody* (2018). Professor Schneier is also a fellow at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University; a Lecturer in Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School. See more from Bruce Schneier on his website.
As governments collect, process and store an increasing amount of sensitive information, this creates new ways by which their citizens - and the government itself - may be put at risk. What are the concerns that public leaders should be aware of? What do good security policy and practices in the public sector look like? What incentives might those seeking to gain access to government data have? In this presentation, Professor Bruce Schneier explores these and other questions around security that every public servant in the digital era should be aware of.
Assigned Readings
Surveillance self-defence: assessing your risks (2019), Guideline from Electronic Frontier Foundation (EEF)
[Beijing’s Big Brother Tech Needs African Faces](https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/07/24/beijings-big-brother-tech-needs-african-faces/?) (2018), Article by Amy Hawkins for Foreign Policy
Short Videos and Insights
In this conversation with students, Professor Bruce Schneier shares some lessons to help public administrators have a better approach to security. The highlights of this presentation are share below. In the last video, he shares some additional thoughts on why he believes we shouldn't be excited about online voting.
💡 IDEA: Please feel free to use these short video snippets as pre class readings or in class to set up discussions. We tried to keep them short and punchy for that purpose.
Security is Hard to Teach (1 min)
In this video, Professor Schneier talks about the difficulties of convincing people that security is an area of expertise.
In times of crisis, the balance between privacy, security and public benefits change (4 min)
Schneier gives the example of contact tracing apps and immunity passports during COVID and how the security factors have been weighed differently from how they might be at other times. He argues that one challenge with crises is how to revert norms around security back to their previous state once the crisis is over.
Security is not always the highest item in the priorization (3 min)
Schneier explains how some technological choices may modify the risk level in a system to a point that security stops being the highest concern.
Being a good defender implies thinking like an attacker (5 min)
In order to be a good defender, you must know how an attacker thinks. In this video, Bruce answers the question about what types of skills one needs to develop to think like the attacker. He focuses his narrative on trying to identify organizational incentives.
Assume that your system will fail (1 min)
One of the ways to protect systems is to design them assuming they will fail. The question then becomes: how does the system fail 'safely'?
The constant dilemma: concentrating or distributing the risk? (2 min)
Schneier answers the question posed by a student on whether it's safer to have a single point of failure or distribute the risk across a system.
Why we shouldn't be excited about voting online (20 min)
In this video, after consulting students on whether they support voting via the internet, Schneier outlines why he is opposed. Part of his argument is that both the winning and the losing side must be confident in the result. He explains why it is harder to have higher levels of trust and adds his opinion on blockchain not being compatible with voting security.
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Acknowledgements
David Eaves would like to note that this material was made possible by numerous practitioners and other faculty who have generously shared stories, pedagogy and their practices. David is also grateful to the students of DPI 662 at the Harvard Kennedy School for enriching the course and providing consent to have the material and questions shared. Finally, an enormous thank you must be given to Beatriz Vasconcellos, who helped assemble and organize the content on this page.