Virginia Tech Lesson: Rare Risks Breed Irrational Responses (from Wired News)

Bruce Schneier writes frequently on security in general, and cryptography in particular, which is how I got exposed to him.  Schneier is spending far more time these days writing about security and risks, because, for the most part, cryptography these days is pretty good.  The bigger problems come with how people use cryptography.  (It makes no sense, for example, to increase the cryptographic strength of passwords when people are just writing them down on post-it notes on their monitors.)

In the essay above, Schneier talks about the aftermath of the VTech shootings, and all the armchair quarterbacking.  It's a good read ... basically, saying that extremely rare events don't make for good policy-making.