#RSAC: How to Hack Society

The method, procedures, and practices used by cybersecurity professionals have relevance beyond just the technology sphere; they can also be used to hack society.

That's the view espoused by Bruce Schneier, security technologist, researcher, and lecturer at the Harvard Kennedy School, during a keynote session at the RSA Conference in San Francisco.

"This is the big idea: we here in our community have developed some very effective techniques to deal with code and technology," Schneier said. "Can our expertise in IT security transfer to broader social systems like the tax code, or the systems we use to choose our elected officials or the market economy?"

Schneier argued that the hacker mindset, that is, an approach to thinking about how things fail and how to make things fail, has broader implications than just computer security. He suggested that the cybersecurity procedural mindset is valuable in a broader context and can be used to help secure the systems that make up society.

"As the world looks more like a computer, our security skills become more applicable," he said.

That said, Schneier noted that he didn't want to imply that technology can fix everything, but rather there is perhaps a way to blend technology and policy in a new way that can improve human communities.

The Hacking Mindset

Using a hacking mindset to impact society isn't an entirely new idea. Schneier remarked that NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden wrote in his memoir that the US intelligence community hacked the Constitution in order to justi ..

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