Democracy is a system: a complex nonlinear tightly coupled system of systems that's surprisingly vulnerable to hacking, subversion and exploits of all kinds. Our community has expertise in securing complex systems. Can we apply that thinking to design of democratic systems, especially socio-technical systems in the age of increasingly pervasive data collection, ubiquitous computing, and capable AI.

Our speaker this month is Bruce Schneier. Bruce is an internationally renowned security technologist, called a "security guru" by the Economist. He is the New York Times best-selling author of 14 books -- including A Hacker's Mind -- as well as hundreds of articles, essays, and academic papers. His influential newsletter Crypto-Gram and blog Schneier on Security are read by over 250,000 people. Schneier is a fellow at the Berkman-Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, a Lecturer in Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, a board member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and AccessNow, and an advisory board member of EPIC and VerifiedVoting.org. He is the Chief of Security Architecture at Inrupt, Inc.

Talk will both be livestreamed here and later archived here on the EFF-Austin YouTube channels. Questions for the speaker from virtual attendees may be submitted via the Youtube livestream chat, our Twitter account, @EFFaustin, or our Mastodon account, @effaustin@mastodon.social.