We Have Root, published by Wiley in September 2019, is Schneier's third collection of essays drawn from the schneier-on-security-blog and crypto-gram-newsletter, covering roughly 2013 to 2019. The title — a hacker's term for having obtained full administrative access to a system — gestures at the extended hacking concept that Schneier would develop fully in a-hackers-mind, published four years later. It represents the bridge between the trust-and-surveillance-era and the systems-subversion-era.
Content and Themes
The essays in We Have Root cover the security and political debates of the mid-2010s: the aftermath of the Snowden revelations, the rise of ransomware and state-sponsored hacking, debates over encryption backdoors (the FBI-Apple dispute over iPhone access is addressed directly), the security implications of machine learning, and the early visible signs of election interference and influence operations. Several essays engage directly with the question of internet governance and who controls critical digital infrastructure.
The collection captures a period when the arguments Schneier had been making about surveillance, trust, and security economics moved from theoretical concerns to observable political realities. The schneier-on-security-blog and crypto-gram-newsletter had long analyzed these dynamics; by 2015-2019, many of the scenarios Schneier had warned about were actively occurring.
The Hacking Theme
The title's hacker idiom is significant. "We have root" means complete system control, and Schneier uses it to signal the theme running through the later essays: the question of who has control of digital systems, and what that control means for power relations in society. This prefigures hacking-as-systems-subversion explicitly — the move from understanding root access as a technical fact to understanding it as a metaphor for the power asymmetries that define the digital age.
Position in the Essay Collection Series
We Have Root is the third in a series that includes schneier-on-security-book and carry-on. The three collections together constitute a running record of Schneier's commentary on security events and policy over roughly two decades. Readers interested in how his thinking evolved in real time — rather than as synthesized in book-length arguments — will find the essay collections more illuminating than the books. We Have Root in particular captures the moment when the surveillance-state and hacking-of-democracy themes became inseparable in his analysis.