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Schneier: The Dishonest Minority: Security and its Role in Modern Society

171 points by FilterJoe 15y ago

seanalltogether 15y ago
While not related specifically to security, I've always been fascinated with the fact that Japan recognizes their 'dishonesty minority' the yakuza as legitimate organizations. While most countries run around declaring war on their black market parasites, Japan has allowed them to slice of their piece of the pie and avoid the nastiness.
- guelo 15y ago
  That's not unique to Japan, criminal organizations have been able to gain differing levels of legitimacy and tolerance in just about every society, from the current Russian government to the American mafia in Nevada to too many examples of corruption around the world to list. And no, it is not commendable.
unwind 15y ago
All I know about publishing is from reading Charles Stross' blog (especially http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/04/common-misconceptions-about-pu-1.html http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/04/common-m...), but doesn't manuscript-submit in November 2011 and publishing in February 2012 seem awfully fast?
- blahedo 15y ago
  That's only the final manuscript---he's got a draft now and the editing process will be ongoing well before November.
- tlb 15y ago
  It also seems very slow. Why does proofreading and typesetting take more than 2-3 days?
  - rprasad 15y ago
    Manuscripts come filled with errors, and it takes a lot of time to find all of them and correct them. Errors include punctuation, spelling, grammar, word choice and even style. It's not just something you can leave to a speedreader or a computer program. Typesetting is the precursor to (web) page design. There's a lot of work involved. Programs like Adobe inDesign streamline the tedious aspects of page design, but not the work that goes into actually designing the look of each page.
joelangeway 15y ago
It's interesting that so many commenters take issue with the term "dishonest minority." I agree that honesty is usually the best policy, but I would lie to the Nazis about the Jews in the addic. This is the value in the dishonest minority and the conflict that the term implies to people who equate dishonesty with evil is central to the point.
- wazoox 15y ago
  Schneier is Kantian, here. He probably has read the "Critique of practical reason." Let me tell you of the debate between Benjamin Constant and Immanuel Kant in 1797 IIRC, after the Critique's publication. Kant affirmed therein that lying, as a general rule, is always wrong. Constant contradicted this idea, asking : how should you manage the case when someone comes to you and ask for protection from some bandits about to kill him, then? Shouldn't you tell the truth to the violent mob, that the guy they're looking for is indeed hidden in your closet? Kant replies that the right thing to do is to lie to protect the innocent, but knowing that it's as a constrained exception to the absolute rule : "you should not lie". The fact that you commit a wrong for a greater good doesn't entirely excuse the wrong or alter the rule. Most people, however, fail to adhere to this subtle analysis. Hence their displeasure with the word "dishonest".
  - silverbax88 15y ago
    The issue that I have with the term 'dishonest minority' is that it isn't accurate in the groups that he is attempting to describe. I love his underlying concepts, but inclusion of all rule-breakers as 'dishonest' is problematic. The issue isn't whether lying is wrong or right. The issue is whether breaking a man-made rule is always wrong or right. "Dishonest" is not as accurate as "insubordinate" when including all murderers who break the law in with someone who blocks traffic to protest civil rights injustice. They are both breaking the rules, but is the second person actually 'dishonest' or rather, non-compliant? The overall issue is that it's pretty clear the term 'dishonest minority' was chosen for the shock value, not accuracy. In a technical book that seems so promising, using a carnival barker tactic to raise interest seems to belittle the underlying content.
ChuckMcM 15y ago
"But none of these systems, with the possible exception of some fanciful science-fiction technologies, can ever bring that dishonest minority down to zero." This is a concept that is very useful to internalize. In systems its the 'no subsystem will operate 100% correctly all of the time' in social justice scenarios its 'there will always be people who are poor'. While the first part of that "things break" or "shit happens" to be colloquial, is accepted easily the latter 'there will always be poor people' is less easily so. But as Schneir has eloquently pointed out in his thesis statement humans are just another system composed of independent actors who are nominally out for the collective good. Understanding this core systems concept can really help you understand where you will need to focus systemic processes or tools which will maintain the systems primary function.
- ender7 15y ago
  I fail to see what connection the article has to poor people. Poor people are neither "uncooperative" (indeed, they tend to occupy some of the most cooperative jobs where they are told what to do and then do it), nor "parasitic" (they tend to work very hard at jobs that benefit society), nor do they deviate from the "social norm." Nor, in many societies, are they a minority. I suspect you have confused poor people with criminals, dissenters, or activists.
  - awj 15y ago
    No, he's just shifting from Schneier's original point out to "no system will operate 100% correctly", then from there to economic inequality.
    - ender7 15y ago
      Schneier's original point is "every cooperative system will always contain parasitic elements; while these elements can be deleterious to the correct functioning of the system, they are also a critically important source of diversity and change." If all the reader gets out of the article is that "systems never perform at 100% efficiency" then they are ignoring the entire point of the article. As such, the root post seems to be hijacking the topic rather than talking about what Schneier actually said.
bh42222 15y ago
Bruce seems to be associating dissent with sabotage here: Vibrant societies need a dishonest minority; if society makes its dishonest minority too small, it stifles dissent as well as common crime. I disagree with this vehemently. Dissent is not crime. And his argument that society needs a bit of dishonesty is also a bit odd. I see it as something any large cooperative system is doomed to end up with. This is also what his first paragraphs explains. And I think there have been software simulations which show how both "criminals" and "cops" naturally arise in a complex cooperative system. I think his attempt to link dissent with crime and dishonesty is a terrible way to defend the need for dissent.
- Symmetry 15y ago
  Bruce isn't saying that dissent is a crime, he's saying that the extreme measures we would need to use to reduce dishonesty (good) would also have the negative impact of stifling dissent (very bad) - so we shouldn't use these extreme measures.
- oconnore 15y ago
  Dissent is the expression of opposing opinions from the law. This often takes the form of crime. When Rosa Parks sat in the front of the bus, she was expressing dissent. But she was also violating the law, and therefore committing a crime.
- pmichaud 15y ago
  Dissent IS crime though. For example, stealing is dissent from the accepted notion that property can be owned. It's an assumption so baked into your brain that you accept it implicitly, but it's not a law of physics or anything. Any deviation from the rules of the system is a challenge to those rules. I think the distinction between crime and dissent in your mind is actually just whether you agree with the person doing it or not. Civil Rights activists were criminals. Until they weren't.
  - silverbax88 15y ago
    I have to disagree with this definition, because it doesn't have to be breaking a law. It just has to be breaking a 'rule'. Breaking a rule doesn't necessarily equate crime. As an example, it may be a rule to be on the job by 8 am. Being late can get you fired, but in most cases it's not going to land you in jail because being late to work is not illegal.
chopsueyar 15y ago
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_P._Kennedy,_Sr http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_P._Kennedy,_Sr.
zipdog 15y ago
It's interesting to jump between his opening comment on society 'tolerating' the uncooperatives (as long as they're not too numerous or too effective) to his end-point that the dishonest minority serves as a catalyst for social change. His statement of toleration of uncooperatives doesn`t seem to capture that society is better off with some of them (the dissenters) and that its actually in the interests of the governors to tolerate a certain amount of uncooperatives - not just because it overly onerous not to, but because otherwise stagnation will make the whole society vulnerable to an outside competitor.
- zaphar 15y ago
  His statement of toleration wasn't meant to illustrate the fact that society is better off with some dissenters. The two facts: * Society tolerates a certain level of dissension * Society is better off with a certain level of dissension are not necessarily connected, other than their focus, and one does not necessarily imply the other. They can be viewed as two distinct facets of the phenomenon he is exploring.
tzs 15y ago
All complex systems contain parasites. In any system of cooperative behavior, an uncooperative strategy will be effective -- and the system will tolerate the uncooperatives -- as long as they're not too numerous or too effective. Thus, as a species evolves cooperative behavior, it also evolves a dishonest minority that takes advantage of the honest majority. If individuals within a species have the ability to switch strategies, the dishonest minority will never be reduced to zero. As a result, the species simultaneously evolves two things: 1) security systems to protect itself from this dishonest minority, and 2) deception systems to successfully be parasitic. That would be a pretty good description of IP. IP is in economic terms non-rival and non-excludable. It turns out that a free market does not work for goods that are non-rival and non-excludable (by "work" I mean reach a theoretical optimal allocation of resources to production). We developed a cooperative behavior in order to make it so a free market would work for such goods--basically by PRETENDING that IP is rival and excludable. Some chose not to cooperate, and ignore that. As long as they are not too numerous, the system as a whole does not break down. The majority pretends that IP is rival and excludable, so pay creators for their creations, and creators get paid roughly in proportion to the demand for their works, and thus creators tend to create the works that the consumers want. DRM has been developed to attempt to limit the effects of the uncooperative, and the uncooperative have developed systems to try to make it harder to detect piracy.
- chc 15y ago
  I would argue that it's a subset of the IP holders who are the parasites here, using their wealth to increase their rights beyond what is reasonable and in the interests of those with whom they are supposed to be cooperating. Piracy is the reaction Schneier mentions to the noncooperatives becoming too numerous and too effective. DRM is yet another strategy to limit the rights of those who continue to cooperate.
  - A1kmm 15y ago
    There is more than one kind of parasite. Copyright and other intellectual exclusion (IE) laws were introduced in good faith to ensure that (1) it is rational to undertake intellectual endeavours and (2) the number of people who benefit from intellectual endeavours but don't support its development is limited. Then the background against which IE had been written changed; now, some IE holders began to abuse their monopoly (a form of parasitic behaviour), and they came to informal understandings with lawmakers (who also put their own personal interests ahead of the collective interest, which is again parasitic) to strengthen the IE laws. The real problem with IE laws is that as more people use intellectual works, the value to society increases, but due to the exclusionary nature of IE laws, they discourage widespread dissemination. The best solution would be a separate parallel economy for intellectual works where all consumers pay an amount from the primary economy that doesn't depend on how many intellectual works they consume, but producers receive an amount that depends on how much utility consumers directly or indirectly extract from their work (in proportion to all other intellectual works). That would open a number of difficult issues, and current parasites under the IE scheme have amassed enough power to resist it strongly, so I doubt we would see it any time soon even though it would be collectively beneficial.
stretchwithme 15y ago
Unfortunately, the dishonest minority has learned to disguise itself and move into enforcing things that benefit the state at the expense of the populations it feeds upon. With democracy and a lot of influence by government over the media, it can often even dupe those populations into thinking that the population is in control and are the beneficiaries.
mkramlich 15y ago
Based on the quality of the author's writing and the clarity of his thinking, I'm looking forward to reading that book. His book Applied Cryptography was one of the best written CS books I've ever seen.

171 points by FilterJoe 15y ago

While not related specifically to security, I've always been fascinated with the fact that Japan recognizes their 'dishonesty minority' the yakuza as legitimate organizations. While most countries run around declaring war on their black market parasites, Japan has allowed them to slice of their piece of the pie and avoid the nastiness.

guelo 15y ago
That's not unique to Japan, criminal organizations have been able to gain differing levels of legitimacy and tolerance in just about every society, from the current Russian government to the American mafia in Nevada to too many examples of corruption around the world to list. And no, it is not commendable.

unwind 15y ago

All I know about publishing is from reading Charles Stross' blog (especially http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/04/common-misconceptions-about-pu-1.html http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/04/common-m...), but doesn't manuscript-submit in November 2011 and publishing in February 2012 seem awfully fast?

blahedo 15y ago
That's only the final manuscript---he's got a draft now and the editing process will be ongoing well before November.
tlb 15y ago
It also seems very slow. Why does proofreading and typesetting take more than 2-3 days?
- rprasad 15y ago
  Manuscripts come filled with errors, and it takes a lot of time to find all of them and correct them. Errors include punctuation, spelling, grammar, word choice and even style. It's not just something you can leave to a speedreader or a computer program. Typesetting is the precursor to (web) page design. There's a lot of work involved. Programs like Adobe inDesign streamline the tedious aspects of page design, but not the work that goes into actually designing the look of each page.

joelangeway 15y ago

It's interesting that so many commenters take issue with the term "dishonest minority." I agree that honesty is usually the best policy, but I would lie to the Nazis about the Jews in the addic. This is the value in the dishonest minority and the conflict that the term implies to people who equate dishonesty with evil is central to the point.

wazoox 15y ago
Schneier is Kantian, here. He probably has read the "Critique of practical reason." Let me tell you of the debate between Benjamin Constant and Immanuel Kant in 1797 IIRC, after the Critique's publication. Kant affirmed therein that lying, as a general rule, is always wrong. Constant contradicted this idea, asking : how should you manage the case when someone comes to you and ask for protection from some bandits about to kill him, then? Shouldn't you tell the truth to the violent mob, that the guy they're looking for is indeed hidden in your closet? Kant replies that the right thing to do is to lie to protect the innocent, but knowing that it's as a constrained exception to the absolute rule : "you should not lie". The fact that you commit a wrong for a greater good doesn't entirely excuse the wrong or alter the rule. Most people, however, fail to adhere to this subtle analysis. Hence their displeasure with the word "dishonest".
- silverbax88 15y ago
  The issue that I have with the term 'dishonest minority' is that it isn't accurate in the groups that he is attempting to describe. I love his underlying concepts, but inclusion of all rule-breakers as 'dishonest' is problematic. The issue isn't whether lying is wrong or right. The issue is whether breaking a man-made rule is always wrong or right. "Dishonest" is not as accurate as "insubordinate" when including all murderers who break the law in with someone who blocks traffic to protest civil rights injustice. They are both breaking the rules, but is the second person actually 'dishonest' or rather, non-compliant? The overall issue is that it's pretty clear the term 'dishonest minority' was chosen for the shock value, not accuracy. In a technical book that seems so promising, using a carnival barker tactic to raise interest seems to belittle the underlying content.

ChuckMcM 15y ago

"But none of these systems, with the possible exception of some fanciful science-fiction technologies, can ever bring that dishonest minority down to zero." This is a concept that is very useful to internalize. In systems its the 'no subsystem will operate 100% correctly all of the time' in social justice scenarios its 'there will always be people who are poor'. While the first part of that "things break" or "shit happens" to be colloquial, is accepted easily the latter 'there will always be poor people' is less easily so. But as Schneir has eloquently pointed out in his thesis statement humans are just another system composed of independent actors who are nominally out for the collective good. Understanding this core systems concept can really help you understand where you will need to focus systemic processes or tools which will maintain the systems primary function.

ender7 15y ago
I fail to see what connection the article has to poor people. Poor people are neither "uncooperative" (indeed, they tend to occupy some of the most cooperative jobs where they are told what to do and then do it), nor "parasitic" (they tend to work very hard at jobs that benefit society), nor do they deviate from the "social norm." Nor, in many societies, are they a minority. I suspect you have confused poor people with criminals, dissenters, or activists.
- awj 15y ago
  No, he's just shifting from Schneier's original point out to "no system will operate 100% correctly", then from there to economic inequality.
  - ender7 15y ago
    Schneier's original point is "every cooperative system will always contain parasitic elements; while these elements can be deleterious to the correct functioning of the system, they are also a critically important source of diversity and change." If all the reader gets out of the article is that "systems never perform at 100% efficiency" then they are ignoring the entire point of the article. As such, the root post seems to be hijacking the topic rather than talking about what Schneier actually said.

bh42222 15y ago

Bruce seems to be associating dissent with sabotage here: Vibrant societies need a dishonest minority; if society makes its dishonest minority too small, it stifles dissent as well as common crime. I disagree with this vehemently. Dissent is not crime. And his argument that society needs a bit of dishonesty is also a bit odd. I see it as something any large cooperative system is doomed to end up with. This is also what his first paragraphs explains. And I think there have been software simulations which show how both "criminals" and "cops" naturally arise in a complex cooperative system. I think his attempt to link dissent with crime and dishonesty is a terrible way to defend the need for dissent.

Symmetry 15y ago
Bruce isn't saying that dissent is a crime, he's saying that the extreme measures we would need to use to reduce dishonesty (good) would also have the negative impact of stifling dissent (very bad) - so we shouldn't use these extreme measures.
oconnore 15y ago
Dissent is the expression of opposing opinions from the law. This often takes the form of crime. When Rosa Parks sat in the front of the bus, she was expressing dissent. But she was also violating the law, and therefore committing a crime.
pmichaud 15y ago
Dissent IS crime though. For example, stealing is dissent from the accepted notion that property can be owned. It's an assumption so baked into your brain that you accept it implicitly, but it's not a law of physics or anything. Any deviation from the rules of the system is a challenge to those rules. I think the distinction between crime and dissent in your mind is actually just whether you agree with the person doing it or not. Civil Rights activists were criminals. Until they weren't.
- silverbax88 15y ago
  I have to disagree with this definition, because it doesn't have to be breaking a law. It just has to be breaking a 'rule'. Breaking a rule doesn't necessarily equate crime. As an example, it may be a rule to be on the job by 8 am. Being late can get you fired, but in most cases it's not going to land you in jail because being late to work is not illegal.

chopsueyar 15y ago

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_P._Kennedy,_Sr http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_P._Kennedy,_Sr.

zipdog 15y ago

It's interesting to jump between his opening comment on society 'tolerating' the uncooperatives (as long as they're not too numerous or too effective) to his end-point that the dishonest minority serves as a catalyst for social change. His statement of toleration of uncooperatives doesn`t seem to capture that society is better off with some of them (the dissenters) and that its actually in the interests of the governors to tolerate a certain amount of uncooperatives - not just because it overly onerous not to, but because otherwise stagnation will make the whole society vulnerable to an outside competitor.

zaphar 15y ago
His statement of toleration wasn't meant to illustrate the fact that society is better off with some dissenters. The two facts: * Society tolerates a certain level of dissension * Society is better off with a certain level of dissension are not necessarily connected, other than their focus, and one does not necessarily imply the other. They can be viewed as two distinct facets of the phenomenon he is exploring.

tzs 15y ago

All complex systems contain parasites. In any system of cooperative behavior, an uncooperative strategy will be effective -- and the system will tolerate the uncooperatives -- as long as they're not too numerous or too effective. Thus, as a species evolves cooperative behavior, it also evolves a dishonest minority that takes advantage of the honest majority. If individuals within a species have the ability to switch strategies, the dishonest minority will never be reduced to zero. As a result, the species simultaneously evolves two things: 1) security systems to protect itself from this dishonest minority, and 2) deception systems to successfully be parasitic. That would be a pretty good description of IP. IP is in economic terms non-rival and non-excludable. It turns out that a free market does not work for goods that are non-rival and non-excludable (by "work" I mean reach a theoretical optimal allocation of resources to production). We developed a cooperative behavior in order to make it so a free market would work for such goods--basically by PRETENDING that IP is rival and excludable. Some chose not to cooperate, and ignore that. As long as they are not too numerous, the system as a whole does not break down. The majority pretends that IP is rival and excludable, so pay creators for their creations, and creators get paid roughly in proportion to the demand for their works, and thus creators tend to create the works that the consumers want. DRM has been developed to attempt to limit the effects of the uncooperative, and the uncooperative have developed systems to try to make it harder to detect piracy.

chc 15y ago
I would argue that it's a subset of the IP holders who are the parasites here, using their wealth to increase their rights beyond what is reasonable and in the interests of those with whom they are supposed to be cooperating. Piracy is the reaction Schneier mentions to the noncooperatives becoming too numerous and too effective. DRM is yet another strategy to limit the rights of those who continue to cooperate.
- A1kmm 15y ago
  There is more than one kind of parasite. Copyright and other intellectual exclusion (IE) laws were introduced in good faith to ensure that (1) it is rational to undertake intellectual endeavours and (2) the number of people who benefit from intellectual endeavours but don't support its development is limited. Then the background against which IE had been written changed; now, some IE holders began to abuse their monopoly (a form of parasitic behaviour), and they came to informal understandings with lawmakers (who also put their own personal interests ahead of the collective interest, which is again parasitic) to strengthen the IE laws. The real problem with IE laws is that as more people use intellectual works, the value to society increases, but due to the exclusionary nature of IE laws, they discourage widespread dissemination. The best solution would be a separate parallel economy for intellectual works where all consumers pay an amount from the primary economy that doesn't depend on how many intellectual works they consume, but producers receive an amount that depends on how much utility consumers directly or indirectly extract from their work (in proportion to all other intellectual works). That would open a number of difficult issues, and current parasites under the IE scheme have amassed enough power to resist it strongly, so I doubt we would see it any time soon even though it would be collectively beneficial.

stretchwithme 15y ago

Unfortunately, the dishonest minority has learned to disguise itself and move into enforcing things that benefit the state at the expense of the populations it feeds upon. With democracy and a lot of influence by government over the media, it can often even dupe those populations into thinking that the population is in control and are the beneficiaries.

mkramlich 15y ago

Based on the quality of the author's writing and the clarity of his thinking, I'm looking forward to reading that book. His book Applied Cryptography was one of the best written CS books I've ever seen.