Bruce Schneier (/ˈʃnaɪ.ər/; born January 15, 1963) is an American cryptographer, computer security professional, privacy specialist, and writer.

Schneier is an Adjunct Lecturer in Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School[2] and a Fellow at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society as of November, 2013.

As a Fellow of Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University since 2013,[3] Schneier has been exploring the intersection of security, technology, and people, with an emphasis on power.

[2] Schneier was married to Karen Cooper in 1997 and lived in Minneapolis;[14] they published restaurant reviews in the Pulse of the Twin Cities.

[20] The law is phrased as: Any person can invent a security system so clever that she or he can't think of how to break it.He attributes this to Bruce Schneier, who wrote in 1998: "Anyone, from the most clueless amateur to the best cryptographer, can create an algorithm that he himself can't break.

In The Codebreakers, David Kahn states: "Few false ideas have more firmly gripped the minds of so many intelligent men than the one that, if they just tried, they could invent a cipher that no one could break", and in "A Few Words On Secret Writing", in July 1841, Edgar Allan Poe had stated: "Few persons can be made to believe that it is not quite an easy thing to invent a method of secret writing which shall baffle investigation.

This book is about the latter.Schneier is critical of digital rights management (DRM) and has said that it allows a vendor to increase lock-in.

[27] Defending against the broad threat of terrorism is generally better than focusing on specific potential terrorist plots.

Real-world terrorists would also be likely to notice the highly specific security measures, and simply attack in some other way.

Among many other examples of movie plot threats, Schneier described banning baby carriers from subways, for fear that they may contain explosives.

[34] Schneier has criticized security approaches that try to prevent any malicious incursion, instead arguing that designing systems to fail well is more important.

[35] The designer of a system should not underestimate the capabilities of an attacker, as technology may make it possible in the future to do things that are not possible at the present.

In 2015, Schneier received the EPIC Lifetime Achievement Award from Electronic Privacy Information Center.

[39] In 2011, he was awarded an honorary Ph.D from the University of Westminster in London, England, by the Department of Electronics and Computer Science in recognition of Schneier's 'hard work and contribution to industry and public life'.

The weblog started out as a way to publish essays before they appeared in Crypto-Gram, making it possible for others to comment on them while the stories were still current, but over time the newsletter became a monthly email version of the blog, re-edited and re-organized.