Common-Knowledge Attacks on Democracy

Great model! Simple enough to understand, fits a lot of recent phenomena. Scary implications, but we should be able to respond effectively.

Unexpected but good to see Schneier doing this kind of work.

Ya, i've been saying something like this for a while. China, for instance, is uniquely invulnerable to this sort of attack. Because the state is already in charge of censoring information, it is much more difficult to flood them with misinformation. It's one of the many reasons i'm concerned that models like Chinas will actually flourish more than they otherwise would in the coming years.

Democracy is doomed, but not because of advanced attacks. Autocracy/nationalism/monarchy/etc are just the natural order of human societies. We've had a good run, but so did the Greeks and Romans.

I don't know why nbp234's comment with the link to Bruce Schneier's blog is dead, but I think it is pretty valuable, so I'll post it again: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2018/11/propaganda_an...

I'm glad that someone of Schneier's reputation and ability is taking this issue seriously enough to at least co-author a paper on it. I know that the focus of this forum is technology news and whatever hackers find interesting, and I know (and have seen here) that the more political a particular post is, the more inevitable it becomes for the discourse to devolve into something non-constructive and toxic. At the same time, I strongly feel that as part of the community people who have designed and implemented the technologies that have had such an major impact on civil discourse and politics today, I find the reluctance to discuss and own up to the fact disappointing. Even the scientists behind the Manhattan Project felt and expressed some responsibility and remorse for the nuclear weapons that came about from their work.