# A hacker's mind: how the powerful bend society's rules and how to bend them back #### 2023 - Bruce Schneier **Link**: **DOI**: **Links**: **Tags**: **zotLink**: [zot](zotero://select/items/@schneierHackerMindHow2023) ###Abstract ``` Long associated with computing technology, a hack is way to subvert a system's rules to the hacker's benefit in a way that is unanticipated and unintended by the system's designers. In A Hacker's Mind, Bruce Schneier takes the term out of the world of computing and uses it to analyze the social systems that underpin our society: from tax laws to financial markets and beyond. He reveals an array of powerful actors who deploy hacks to bend our economic, political, and legal systems to their will. In Schneier's estimation, "even the loopholes have loopholes," and this is by design. Left unchecked, and supercharged by techniques from artificial intelligence, these hacks threaten to upend our financial markets, weaken our democracy, and infiltrate our own cognitive systems. But if we can understand the hacking mindset properly, we can improve existing systems, predict and defend against hacks, and realize a more equitable world ``` ### Notes-Highlights [[eKnowledgeV3/_Resources/Literature Notes/Readwise/A Hacker's Mind|A Hacker's Mind]] [[Foldering drafts as a plausible deniability hack]] - That hack wasn’t new. It even has a name: foldering. In separate incidents, it was used by General Petraeus, Paul Manafort, and the 9/11 terrorists. They all realized that they could evade communications surveillance if they shared an email account with their co-conspirators and wrote messages to each other, keeping them as email drafts and never sending them. ([Location 457](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0B3FY5R3M&location=457)) -[[Ranked choice voting]] - - One fix is ranked-choice voting, in which voters rank their choices for an office, the lowest-scoring candidate is eliminated, and votes for those bested candidates are redistributed in sequential “runoffs” until one achieves a majority. A ranked-choice system prevents third-party spoilers (a would-be spoiler’s votes are just reallocated to a different candidate, most likely one from whom they were intended to siphon support), and helps to ensure that the candidate most acceptable to a true majority of the electorate wins the election. ([Location 2560](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0B3FY5R3M&location=2560))