Ominous look at how our love of technology and "the Internet of things" have made society newly vulnerable.
Economist senior editor Lucas (Deception: The Untold Story of East-West Espionage Today, 2012, etc.) argues that our reliance on smartphones and platforms like Google, combined with a gulf between technology designers and policymakers, has enabled criminals to wreak high-tech havoc. "Digital technology exposes every area of our lives to attacks,” he writes, “and renders outdated our assumptions about safety." The author builds a grim catalog of hidden dangers faced by both individuals and corporations, detouring to examine such minutiae as the sale of "zero-day vulnerabilities" for software and "swamping" attacks by botnets (hijacked computers owned by the unwitting). To punctuate his argument, he imagines a hypothetical middle-class couple who enjoy the bourgeois benefits their wired lifestyle offers while remaining blissfully unaware of risks to their identity, privacy, and financial well-being: “Our friends are only one click away to falling victim to scams organized by…gangs.” Lucas enumerates these dangers in well-structured chapters that suggest fraud, piracy, and malware lurk behind ordinary online interactions. For example, the cellphone “enables probably the most sophisticated and pervasive attacks on privacy and anonymity yet invented.” Email, of course, continues to enable all manner of “phishing” attacks and assumed-identity scams, despite the availability of encryption and countermeasures. “On the Internet,” writes the author, “distance is irrelevant: your attacker can be on the other side of the world.” Lucas examines the geopolitics of such malfeasance, noting how Russia and China have encouraged industrial hacking, while Israel and the U.S. may have unleashed the Stuxnet worm on Iran’s nuclear program. Lucas can be witty, and he orients his discussion more toward the lay reader than some similar titles. While his scary techno-narrative at times becomes overwhelming or generalized, he tries to articulate common-sense precautions for such readers.
An engaged overview of technology’s strange new virtual hazards.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-63286-225-9
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2015
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BOOK REVIEW
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
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SEEN & HEARD
Known for her often contentious perspectives, New York Times opinion writer Weiss battles societal Jewish intolerance through lucid prose and a linear playbook of remedies.
While she was vividly aware of anti-Semitism throughout her life, the reality of the problem hit home when an active shooter stormed a Pittsburgh synagogue where her family regularly met for morning services and where she became a bat mitzvah years earlier. The massacre that ensued there further spurred her outrage and passionate activism. She writes that European Jews face a three-pronged threat in contemporary society, where physical, moral, and political fears of mounting violence are putting their general safety in jeopardy. She believes that Americans live in an era when “the lunatic fringe has gone mainstream” and Jews have been forced to become “a people apart.” With palpable frustration, she adroitly assesses the origins of anti-Semitism and how its prevalence is increasing through more discreet portals such as internet self-radicalization. Furthermore, the erosion of civility and tolerance and the demonization of minorities continue via the “casual racism” of political figures like Donald Trump. Following densely political discourses on Zionism and radical Islam, the author offers a list of bullet-point solutions focused on using behavioral and personal action items—individual accountability, active involvement, building community, loving neighbors, etc.—to help stem the tide of anti-Semitism. Weiss sounds a clarion call to Jewish readers who share her growing angst as well as non-Jewish Americans who wish to arm themselves with the knowledge and intellectual tools to combat marginalization and defuse and disavow trends of dehumanizing behavior. “Call it out,” she writes. “Especially when it’s hard.” At the core of the text is the author’s concern for the health and safety of American citizens, and she encourages anyone “who loves freedom and seeks to protect it” to join with her in vigorous activism.
A forceful, necessarily provocative call to action for the preservation and protection of American Jewish freedom.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-593-13605-8
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Aug. 22, 2019
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