Eric Cantor's Shocking Defeat & America's Cyber Security Complex

In their latest book, Behold a Pale Farce, Violet Cheung and Bill Blunden engage in an honest discussion of society’s cyber insecurity problem by delving into the often unacknowledged technical, economic, and political root causes. As a result they’re able to prescribe solutions that don’t require users to sacrifice liberty or security. This is in stark contrast to flawed approaches, like the NSA’s dragnet surveillance, which are based on a mischaracterization of the problem. The rampant use of hyperbole and worst-case scenarios breeds the kind of mass anxiety which leads the public to blindly accept inappropriate solutions.

Bill is a computer security researcher whose current areas of inquiry touch on information security, anti-forensics, and institutional analysis. Though he’s probably best known for writing the industry’s most detailed manual for designing software back doors to date, the notorious Rootkit Arsenal, over the past two decades Bill has also performed R&D for an enterprise resource planning vendor, developed tools for network security appliances, and taken various detours through academia. He shares his findings at conferences like Black Hat, CEIC, SOURCE Boston, and UW-Madison’s LOCKDOWN.