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…

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 required to jointly decrypt the results.

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.

From Anthropic: In mid-September 2025, we detected suspicious activity that later investigation determined to be a highly sophisticated espionage campaign. The attackers used AI’s “agentic” capabilities to an unprecedented degree­ -- using AI not just as an advisor, but to execute the cyberattacks themselves. The threat actor -- ­whom we assess with high confidence was a Chinese state-sponsored group -- ­manipulated our Claude Code tool into attempting infiltration into roughly thirty global targets and succeeded in a small number of cases.

NOTE: I'm teaching at the University of Toronto this school year, and will sign and ship books when I visit the US. Expect considerable delays.

Google has filed a complaint in court that details the scam: In a complaint filed Wednesday, the tech giant accused "a cybercriminal group in China" of selling "phishing for dummies" kits. The kits help unsavvy fraudsters easily “execute a large-scale phishing campaign,” tricking hordes of unsuspecting people into “disclosing sensitive information like passwords, credit card numbers, or banking information, often by impersonating well-known brands, government agencies, or even people the victim knows.”

Kendra Albert gave an excellent talk at USENIX Security this year, pointing out that the legal agreements surrounding vulnerability disclosure muzzle researchers while allowing companies to not fix the vulnerabilities -- exactly the opposite of what the responsible disclosure movement of the early 2000s was supposed to prevent. This is the talk. Thirty years ago, a debate raged over whether vulnerability disclosure was good for computer security.

Social media has been a familiar, even mundane, part of life for nearly two decades. It can be easy to forget it was not always that way. In 2008, social media was just emerging into the mainstream. Facebook reached 100 million users that summer. And a singular candidate was integrating social media into his political campaign: Barack Obama. His campaign's use of social media was so bracingly innovative, so impactful, that it was viewed by journalist…

The next three in this series on online events highlighting interesting uses of AI in cybersecurity are online: #4, #5, and #6. Well worth watching.

Short-finned pilot wales (Globicephala macrorhynchus) eat at lot of squid: To figure out a short-finned pilot whale's caloric intake, Gough says, the team had to combine data from a variety of sources, including movement data from short-lasting tags, daily feeding rates from satellite tags, body measurements collected via aerial drones, and sifting through the stomachs of unfortunate whales that ended up stranded on land.

This is a current list of where and when I am scheduled to speak: My coauthor Nathan E. Sanders and I are speaking at the Rayburn House Office Building in Washington, DC at noon ET on November 17, 2025. The event is hosted by the POPVOX Foundation and the topic is “AI and Congress: Practical Steps to Govern and Prepare…

As AI capabilities grow, we must delineate the roles that should remain exclusively human. The line seems to be between fact-based decisions and judgment-based decisions. For example, in a medical context, if an AI was demonstrably better at reading a test result and diagnosing cancer than a human, you would take the AI in a second. You want the more accurate tool.

The Business of Secrets: Adventures in Selling Encryption Around the World by Fred Kinch (May 24, 2004) From the vantage point of today, it's surreal reading about the commercial cryptography business in the 1970s. Nobody knew anything. The manufacturers didn't know whether the cryptography they sold was any good. The customers didn't know whether the crypto they bought was any good.

Former DoJ attorney John Carlin writes about hackback, which he defines thus: "A hack back is a type of cyber response that incorporates a counterattack designed to proactively engage with, disable, or collect evidence about an attacker. Although hack backs can take on various forms, they are -- ­by definition­ -- not passive defensive measures." His conclusion: As the law currently stands, specific forms of purely defense measures are authorized so long as they affect only the victim’s system or data.

This is why AIs are not ready to be personal assistants: A new attack called 'CometJacking' exploits URL parameters to pass to Perplexity's Comet AI browser hidden instructions that allow access to sensitive data from connected services, like email and calendar. In a realistic scenario, no credentials or user interaction are required and a threat actor can leverage the attack by simply exposing a maliciously crafted URL to targeted users.

Encryption can protect data at rest and data in transit, but does nothing for data in use. What we have are secure enclaves. I've written about this before: Almost all cloud services have to perform some computation on our data. Even the simplest storage provider has code to copy bytes from an internal storage system and deliver them to the user.

The second season of the Netflix reality competition show Squid Game: The Challenge has dropped. (Too many links to pick a few -- search for it.) 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.

Over the past few decades, it's become easier and easier to create fake receipts. Decades ago, it required special paper and printers -- I remember a company in the UK advertising its services to people trying to cover up their affairs. Then, receipts became computerized, and faking them required some artistic skills to make the page look realistic. Now, AI can…

The Department of Justice has indicted thirty-one people over the high-tech rigging of high-stakes poker games. In a typical legitimate poker game, a dealer uses a shuffling machine to shuffle the cards randomly before dealing them to all the players in a particular order. As set forth in the indictment, the rigged games used altered shuffling machines that contained hidden technology allowing the machines to read all the cards in the deck.

For many in the research community, it's gotten harder to be optimistic about the impacts of artificial intelligence. As authoritarianism is rising around the world, AI-generated "slop" is overwhelming legitimate media, while AI-generated deepfakes are spreading misinformation and parroting extremist messages. AI is making warfare more precise and deadly amidst intransigent conflicts. AI companies are exploiting people in the global South who work as data labelers, and profiting from content creators worldwide by using their work without license or compensation.

Microsoft is warning of a scam involving online payroll systems. Criminals use social engineering to steal people's credentials, and then divert direct deposits into accounts that they control. Sometimes they do other things to make it harder for the victim to realize what is happening. I feel like this kind of thing is happening everywhere, with everything. As we move more of our personal and professional lives online, we enable criminals to subvert the very systems we rely on.

These days, the most important meeting attendee isn’t a person: It’s the AI notetaker. This system assigns action items and determines the importance of what is said. If it becomes necessary to revisit the facts of the meeting, its summary is treated as impartial evidence. But clever meeting attendees can manipulate this system’s record by speaking more to what the underlying AI weights for summarization and importance than to their colleagues.

I can't believe that I haven't yet posted this picture of a giant squid at the Smithsonian. 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.

Listen to the Audio on NextBigIdeaClub.com Below, co-authors Bruce Schneier and Nathan E. Sanders share five key insights from their new book, Rewiring Democracy: How AI Will Transform Our Politics, Government, and Citizenship. What's the big idea? AI can be used both for and against the public interest within democracies. It is already being used in the governing of nations around the world, and there is no escaping its continued use in the future by leaders, policy makers, and legal enforcers.