Originally released October 2019. Elections serve two purposes. The first is the obvious one: to pick a winner. The second, but equally important, is to convince the loser to go along with it — which is why hacks often focus on convincing the losing side that the election wasn’t fair.

According to world-renowned computer security expert Bruce Schneier, security experts look at current electronic voting machines and can barely believe their eyes — but voting machine designers never understand the security weakness of what they’re designing, because they have a bureaucrat’s mindset rather than hacker’s mindset.

In this impassioned episode we discuss this hacker mindset, and how to use a career in security to protect democracy and guard dangerous secrets from people who shouldn’t have access to them.

Learn more and see the full transcript on the 80,000 Hours website: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episod...

Chapters:
• Rob’s intro (00:00:00)
• Bruce’s Codex talk (00:02:23)
• The interview begins (00:15:42)
• What is Bruce working on at the moment? (00:16:35)
• How technologists could be vital in shaping policy (00:18:52)
• Most consequential computer security problems today (00:24:12)
• How secure are nuclear weapons systems around the world? (00:34:41)
• Stuxnet and NotPetya (00:42:29)
• Messing with democracy (00:44:44)
• How worried should we be about deepfakes? (00:50:02)
• The similarities between hacking computers and potentially hacking biology in the future (00:55:08)
• Bruce’s critiques of crypto (01:00:05)
• What are some of the most kind of widely-held but incorrect beliefs among computer security people? (01:03:04)
• The hacking mindset (01:05:35)
• Voting machines (01:09:22)
• How secretive should people be about potentially harmful information? (01:16:48)
• Could a career in information security be very useful for reducing global catastrophic risks? (01:21:46)
• How to develop the skills needed in computer security (01:33:44)
• Ubiquitous surveillance (01:52:46)
• Why is Bruce optimistic? (02:05:28)
• Rob’s outro (02:06:43)

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The 80,000 Hours Podcast features unusually in-depth conversations about the world’s most pressing problems and what you can do to solve them.