Decoding The Information Age with Scott Shapiro

Why Is This Happening? The Chris Hayes Podcast

NBCNews

News, Nbcnews, Why Is This Happening?, The Chris Hayes Podcast, Chris Hayes, Politics, Government, Society & Culture, Msnbc, Withpod

4.6 • 8.9K Ratings

🗓️ 4 July 2023

⏱️ 47 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

You’ve probably encountered phishing emails or computer viruses. Or maybe one or more of your accounts has been hacked or compromised. How and why do hackers hack and what are they generally seeking? Our guest this week points out that understanding the answers to those questions is essential for making sense of the psychological, economic, political and social effects of cybercrime. Scott Shapiro is Southmayd Professor of Law and Professor of Philosophy at Yale Law School. He is the author of a new book called, “Fancy Bear Goes Phishing: The Dark History of the Information Age, in Five Extraordinary Hacks.” The book dives into five historical examples, one of which involves its namesake, Fancy Bear, a Russian cyberintelligence unit responsible for hacking the Democratic National Convention. Shapiro joins WITHpod to discuss some of the biggest inflection points in the history of hacking, why the internet is so vulnerable, the role that generative AI may place in future cybercrime and his thoughts on if we should really be concerned about cyberwar.

Transcript

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0:00.0	One of the things I like to tell people is hackers are just not that into you.
0:05.2	They don't care about you per se.
0:07.4	They just care to make some money by infecting your laptop so that it's connected to your
0:14.7	security camera so that it can be part of a big botnet or something like that.
0:19.0	They maybe want to get your credit card information and then you have pin the neck, changing
0:23.0	things.
0:24.0	And there are attacks where you lose access to the internet, but almost nobody dies from
0:31.0	cyber attacks.
0:32.9	And there's an awful lot of money that is exchanges hands.
0:37.0	There's no question about that.
0:38.4	And that's a serious problem.
0:40.0	The social problems go.
0:41.9	But it's not the kind of existential threat that I think climate change is or the problem
0:47.7	of kinetic war is in general.
0:54.7	Hello and welcome to Why is this happening with me, your host Chris Hayes.
1:04.0	You know, for the last 40 years or so, maybe 30 years, I think people talk about us living
1:08.1	in what's called the information age.
1:09.7	It's a little unclear who first coined that term.
1:12.5	It crops up a bunch, Alvin Toffler, who wrote a book called Future Shock.
1:16.5	And then in a subsequent book that got a lot of press, uses that term, a bunch of people
1:20.3	to use that term.
1:21.3	The basic idea of the information age, right, is it like it's human society for a very
	...

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