This Machine Kills Secrets Quotes

“Since September eleventh, the government’s rhetoric has been that if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to worry about,” says Jones with just a hint of righteous anger in his voice. “I say if those are the rules of the game, play them across the board. Show us what goes on.”
― Andy Greenberg, This Machine Kills Secrets: How WikiLeakers, Cypherpunks, and Hacktivists Aim to Free the World's Information

“We don’t yet know the names of the architects who will build the next upgrade to the secret-killing machine. But we’ll know them by their work.”
― Andy Greenberg, This Machine Kills Secrets: How WikiLeakers, Cypherpunks, and Hacktivists Aim to Free the World's Information

“Vietnam had never been a true civil war. It was a war of conquest, initiated and perpetuated for more than two decades by the United States, fueled by presidential secrecy and lies. It was no catastrophic accident. As Ellsberg wrote, it was simply “a crime.”
― Andy Greenberg, This Machine Kills Secrets: How WikiLeakers, Cypherpunks, and Hacktivists Aim to Free the World's Information

“With all their variation in goals and means, OpenLeaks, IMMI, BalkanLeaks, GlobaLeaks, and even Jones’s OpenWatch smartphone apps are all stepchildren of a movement that stretches back to the cypherpunks two decades earlier and the Pentagon Papers two decades before that. And with its greatest successes in just the last few of those forty years, its work is only starting.”
― Andy Greenberg, This Machine Kills Secrets: How WikiLeakers, Cypherpunks, and Hacktivists Aim to Free the World's Information

“So what should be secret, then? “Every situation is different,” he (Domscheit-Berg) answers. “Drawing the line is the toughest question in this field.”
― Andy Greenberg, This Machine Kills Secrets: How WikiLeakers, Cypherpunks, and Hacktivists Aim to Free the World's Information

“The forces that caught Manning are real and significant: The greatest vulnerability for any leaker remains his or her human connections. But the lesson of Manning’s story for a generation of digital natives will be, above all else, that he nearly got away with it. Use the right cryptographic tools, keep your mouth shut, and you, too, can anonymously, frictionlessly, eviscerate an entire institution’s information.”
― Andy Greenberg, This Machine Kills Secrets: How WikiLeakers, Cypherpunks, and Hacktivists Aim to Free the World's Information

“The barriers to modern megaleakers like Manning have crumbled: They needn’t spend a year photocopying. They needn’t be Eagle Scouts or war heroes who penetrate the government’s most elite layer only to go rogue—just one of the millions of Americans with access to secret government documents or the many, many uncountable millions more with access to secret corporate information. And perhaps most important, they needn’t risk reprisal by exposing their identities to the journalists they hope will amplify their whistleblowing.”
― Andy Greenberg, This Machine Kills Secrets: How WikiLeakers, Cypherpunks, and Hacktivists Aim to Free the World's Information