Modern Fear, Modern Security

What moves human beings to innovate measures of security? History will tell us that the most inventive and industrious times are fraught with warfare, uncertainty, and widespread fear. Greg Laden, a longtime ScienceBlogger, helps tackle this topic this month on the new Collective Imagination blog with Peter Tu, a systems design engineer who has developed algorithms for the FBI Automatic Fingerprint Identification System, and is the principle investigator for the ReFace Program at the Visualization and Computer Vision Group at the GE Global Research Center. Greg and Peter discuss the important relationship between your browser's cookies and your web-surfing experience, the Internet Worm's deadliest enemy, parallel cultural responses to fear-driven security, and the "knee-jerkiness" behind cultural elements of security, particularly in the post-9/11 world.

• What about Device Fingerprinting?
• Will ants trump worms in computer security?
• The Cultural Side of Security
• From 9/11 to today, where has and where can security go