Here's a scenario from a future scary movie. Big tech and bad governments get together

under the veneer of democracy. There's mass surveillance of the population and if you step out

of line data held by or available to your government on everything from your bank accounts to

your health care problems can be used against

you. A nightmare, yes, a possibility also yes. We're going to hear from one of the world's

leading experts on the potential for abuse when authoritarian politicians recognize how AI

and your information could help them. In some cases, it may have happened already.

I'm Gavin Esler, and this is not a drill. For his insights into everything from the potential for governments to misuse the information we're compelled to give them,

to the way your own mobile phone can spy on you,

I'm delighted to be joined by Bruce Schneier.

Bruce is a fellow and lecturer at the Harvard Kennedy School.

He's been called a security guru by the economist

and is author of a great deal of literature on how information technologies can be a threat to democracy,

including a hacker's mind how the powerful

bend society's rules and how to bend them back. Bruce, a warm welcome to This is Not a Drill.

Thanks for having me. Now, you've written recently about threat modeling for all of us as citizens

and say it's changing or we should change. Can you explain what we might consider to be some of the threats to us now?

So if the Internet, when you think about it, was built on surveillance. That is the business model of the Internet.

Shatana Zubov calls it surveillance capitalism. And it is the system by which all of the major platforms that we use for free make money, right?

They spy on us, they try to learn about us, and then they try to manipulate us.

That's the advertising stack of the Internet.

And that's been the standard threat model.

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