Product Description

How does society function when you can't trust everyone?

When we think about trust, we naturally think about personal relationships or bank vaults. That's too narrow. Trust is much broader, and much more important. Nothing in society works without trust. It's the foundation of communities, commerce, democracy—everything.

In this insightful and entertaining book, Schneier weaves together ideas from across the social and biological sciences to explain how society induces trust. He shows how trust works and fails in social settings, communities, organizations, countries, and the world.

In today's hyper-connected society, understanding the mechanisms of trust is as important as understanding electricity was a century ago. Issues of trust and security are critical to solving problems as diverse as corporate responsibility, global warming, and our moribund political system. After reading Liars and Outliers, you'll think about social problems, large and small, differently.

AUTHOR BIO

BRUCE SCHNEIER is an internationally renowned security technologist who studies the human side of security. He is the author of eleven books; and hundreds of articles, essays, and academic papers. He has testified before Congress, is a frequent guest on television and radio, and is regularly quoted in the press.

"The closest thing the security industry has to a rock star."
—The Register

ADVANCE PRAISE FOR LIARS AND OUTLIERS

"A rich, insightfully fresh take on what security really means!"
—DAVID ROPEIK, Author of How Risky is it, Really?

"Schneier has accomplished a spectacular tour de force: an enthralling ride through history, economics, and psychology, searching for the meanings of trust and security. A must read."
—ALESSANDRO ACQUISTI, Associate Professor of Information Systems and Public Policy at the Heinz College, Carnegie Mellon University

"Liars and Outliers offers a major contribution to the understandability of these issues, and has the potential to help readers cope with the ever-increasing risks to which we are being exposed. It is well written and delightful to read."
—PETER G. NEUMANN, Principal Scientist in the SRI International Computer Science Laboratory

"Whether it's banks versus robbers, Hollywood versus downloaders, or even the Iranian secret police against democracy activists, security is often a dynamic struggle between a majority who want to impose their will, and a minority who want to push the boundaries. Liars and Outliers will change how you think about conflict, our security, and even who we are."
—ROSS ANDERSON, Professor of Security Engineering at Cambridge University and author of Security Engineering

"Readers of Bruce Schneier's Liars and Outliers will better understand technology and its consequences and become more mature practitioners."
—PABLO G. MOLINA, Professor of Technology Management, Georgetown University

"Liars & Outliers is not just a book about security—it is the book about it. Schneier shows that the power of humour can be harnessed to explore even a serious subject such as security. A great read!"
—FRANK FUREDI, author of On Tolerance: A Defence of Moral Independence

"This fascinating book gives an insightful and convincing framework for understanding security and trust."
—JEFF YAN, Founding Research Director, Center for Cybercrime and Computer Security, Newcastle University

"By analyzing the moving parts and interrelationships among security, trust, and society, Schneier has identifi ed critical patterns, pressures, levers, and security holes within society. Clearly written, thoroughly interdisciplinary, and always smart, Liars and Outliers provides great insight into res...

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #37226 in eBooks
• Published on: 2012-01-27
• Released on: 2012-01-27
• Format: Kindle eBook
• Number of items: 1

Review
"One of the best books I′ve read this year is by a security technologist, Bruce Schneier. In Liars and Outliers, he sets out to investigate how trust works in society and in business, how it is betrayed and the degree to which technology changes all of that, for the better or the worse. Schneier absolutely understands how profoundly trust oils the wheels of business and of daily life." (Margaret Heffernan, CBS MoneyWatch)

"This book will appeal not only to customers interested in computer security but also on the idea of security and trust as a whole in society." (The Bookseller, 16th December 2011)

"This book should be read by anyone in a leadership role, whether they′re in the corporate or political sphere... an easy read and the ideas and thoughts are profound." (Naked Security, February 2012)

"By concentrating on the human angle and packing the book with real world examples he has successfully stretched its appeal outside that of the security specialist to the more general reader." (E & T Magazine, March 2012)

‘This book will appeal not only to customers interested in computer security but also on the idea of security and trust as a whole in society’.  (The Bookseller, 16th December 2011).

‘This book should be read by anyone in a leadership role, whether they′re in the corporate or political sphere... an easy read and the ideas and thoughts are profound.’ (Naked Security, February 2012)

‘By concentrating on the human angle and packing the book with real world examples he has successfully stretched its appeal outside that of the security specialist to the more general reader.’ (E & T Magazine, March 2012)

From the Author
Q: In your book, Liars and Outliers, you write, “Trust and cooperation are the first problems we had to solve before we could become a social species—but in the 21st century, they have become the most important problems we need to solve again.” What do you mean by trust?
A: That is the right question to ask, since there are many different definitions of trust floating around. The trust I am writing about isn’t personal, it’s societal. By my definition, when we trust a person, an institution, or a system, we trust they will behave as we expect them to. It’s more consistency or predictability than intimacy. And if you think about it, this is exactly the sort of trust our complex society runs on. I trust airline pilots, hotel clerks, ATMs, restaurant kitchens, and the company that built the computer I’m writing these answers on.

Q: What makes people trustworthy?
A: That’s the key question the book tackles. Most people are naturally trustworthy, but some are not. There are hotel clerks who will steal your credit card information. There are ATMs that have been hacked by criminals. Some restaurant kitchens serve tainted food. There was even an airline pilot who deliberately crashed his Boeing 767 into the Atlantic Ocean in 1999. Given that there are people who are naturally inclined to be untrustworthy, how does society keep their damage to a minimum? We use what I call societal pressures: morals and reputation are two, laws are another, and security systems are a fourth. Basically, it’s all coercion. We coerce people into behaving in a trustworthy manner because society will fall apart if they don’t.

Q: You introduce the idea of defectors—those who don’t follow “the rules.” What are defectors?
A: One of the central metaphors of the book is the Prisoner’s Dilemma, which sets up the conflict between the interests of a group and the interests of individuals within the group. Cooperating—or acting in a trustworthy manner—sometimes means putting group interest ahead of individual interest. Defecting means acting in one’s self-interest as opposed to the group interest. To put it in concrete terms: we are collectively better off if no one steals, but I am individually better off if I steal other people’s stuff. But if everyone did that, society would collapse. So we need societal pressures to induce cooperation—to prevent people from stealing. There are two basic types of defectors. In this example, the first are people who know stealing is wrong, but steal anyway. The second are people who believe that, in some circumstances, stealing is right. Think of Robin Hood, who stole from the rich and gave to the poor. Or Jean Valjean from Les Miserables, who stole to feed his starving family.

Q: Why are some defectors good for society?
A: Cooperators are people who follow the formal or informal rules of society. Defectors are people who, for whatever reason, break the rules. That definition says nothing about the absolute morality of the society or its rules. When society is in the wrong, it’s defectors who are in the vanguard for change. So it was defectors who helped escape slaves in the antebellum American South. It’s defectors who are agitating to overthrow repressive regimes in the Middle East. And it’s defectors who are fueling the Occupy Wall Street movement. Without defectors, society stagnates.

Q: What major news stories of the past decade were triggered by failed trust? How can we prevent these failures in the future?
A: The story I had most in mind while writing the book was the global financial crisis of a few years ago, where a handful of people cheated the system to their own advantage. Those were particularly newsworthy defectors; but if you start looking, you can see defectors and the effects of their defection everywhere: in corrupt politicians, special interests subverting the tax system, file sharers downloading music and movies without paying for them, and so on. The key characteristic is a situation where the group interest is in opposition to someone’s self-interest, and people have been permitted to follow their own self-interest to the greater harm of the group.

Q: What makes Liars and Outliers so relevant in today’s society?
A: As our systems--whether social systems like Facebook or political systems like Congress--get more complex, the destructive potential of defectors becomes greater. To use another term from the book, the scope of defection increases with more technology. This means that the societal pressures we traditionally put in place to limit defections no longer work, and we need to rethink security. It’s easy to see this in terms of terrorism: one of the reasons terrorists are so scary today is that they can do more damage to society than the terrorists of 20 years ago could—and future technological developments will make the terrorists of 20 years from now scarier still.

Q: What do you hope readers will take away from reading Liars and Outliers?
A: I can do no better than quote from the first chapter: “This book represents my attempt to develop a full-fledged theory of coercion and how it enables compliance and trust within groups. My goal is to rephrase some of those questions and provide a new framework for analysis. I offer new perspectives, and a broader spectrum of what’s possible. Perspectives frame thinking, and sometimes asking new questions is the catalyst to greater understanding. It’s my hope that this book can give people an illuminating new framework with which to help understand the world.”

From the Inside Flap
We don′t demand a background check on the plumber who shows up to fix the leaky sink. We don′t do a chemical analysis on food we eat.

Trust and cooperation are the first problems we had to solve before we could become a social species. In the 21st century, they have become the most important problems we need to solve—again. Our global society has become so large and complex that our traditional trust mechanisms no longer work.

Bruce Schneier, world–renowned for his level–headed thinking on security and technology, tackles this complex subject head–on. Society can′t function without trust, and yet must function even when people are untrustworthy.

Liars and Outliers reaches across academic disciplines to develop an understanding of trust, cooperation, and social stability. From the subtle social cues we use to recognize trustworthy people to the laws that punish the noncompliant, from the way our brains reward our honesty to the bank vaults that keep out the dishonest, keeping people cooperative is a delicate balance of rewards and punishments. It′s a series of evolutionary tricks, social pressures, legal mechanisms, and physical barriers.

In the absence of personal relationships, we have no choice but to substitute security for trust, compliance for trustworthiness. This progression has enabled society to scale to unprecedented complexity, but has also permitted massive global failures.

At the same time, too much cooperation is bad. Without some level of rule–breaking, innovation and social progress become impossible. Society stagnates.

Today′s problems require new thinking, and Liars and Outliers provides that. It is essential that we learn to think clearly about trust. Our future depends on it.