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(28 reviews)
Author: Visit Amazon's Andy Greenberg Page
ISBN : 0142180491
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Format: PDF
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Review
New York Times Editors' Choice
“Greenberg is at his best when on the road — driving through a volcano-ridden Iceland, flying a decrepit Soviet plane with nine hackers, swimming in the Black Sea with fearless Bulgarian journalists. Even seasoned observers of WikiLeaks will find something new and interesting in this book.”— Evgeny Morozov, NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW
"Computer hackers haven’t been made into heroes like this since Stieg Larsson created Lisbeth Salander—and luckily Greenberg shares a bit of Larsson’s flair for suspense, too." — SLATE
Greenberg delves eloquently into the magicians of the all-powerful technology that shatters the confidentiality of any and all state secrets while tapping into issues of personal privacy. — PUBLISHER’S WEEKLY
While lawmakers and law enforcers struggle with the philosophy and practicality of these issues, the people Greenberg profiles have made up their minds, and they are a few steps ahead. If you’re wondering who they are and why they feel so strongly, look no further than this book. — NEW SCIENTIST
“…fascinating and well-researched.” –WALL STREET JOURNAL
“Forbes magazine journalist Andy Greenberg takes readers on a terrific and revealing — if considerably unsettling — investigation into the shadowy war rooms behind our computer screens.” –CLEVELAND PLAIN DEALER
"A globe trotting exploration into the heart of the contentious world of brilliant, eccentric and erratic game changers who have taken the tools at hand and turned them into powerful weapons that can — and have in some cases — altered the course of history…Greenberg went looking for a story and nailed it." — PAPER MAGAZINE
"A series of moving and deeply complex portraits… In all, Greenberg has created a seriously riveting read." — CAPITAL NEW YORK
Gripping…For all the technical detail (which Greenberg excels at explaining), this book is still about human feats and failings, idealism, trust and betrayal. — IRISH TIMES
About the Author
ANDY GREENBERG is a staff writer for Forbes magazine, focusing on technology, information security and digital civil liberties. His Forbes story on WikiLeaks and the future of information leaks was the first magazine cover story to feature Julian Assange. He lives in Brooklyn, New York, with his wife, filmmaker Malika Zouhali-Worrall.
Direct download links available for Free This Machine Kills Secrets: Julian Assange, the Cypherpunks, and Their Fight to Empower Whistleblowers Paperback
- Paperback: 400 pages
- Publisher: Plume; Reprint edition (September 25, 2013)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0142180491
- ISBN-13: 978-0142180495
- Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 5.2 x 0.9 inches
- Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
Free This Machine Kills Secrets: Julian Assange, the Cypherpunks, and Their Fight to Empower Whistleblowers
9 October 2012
After re-reading on Kindle the book is even better. Searching, cross-linking and assembling one or more of Greenberg's characters provides different narratives than his unsettling multiple disjointedness. Read Tim May next to Julian Assange, Mudge next to John Gilmore, Adrian Lamo next to Jacob Appelbaum, Daniel Domscheit-Berg next to Phil Zimmermann. With Kindle these juxtapositions, and others, your own book can be read next to Greenberg's. The book should be put on the web for many variable readings -- it is that valuable to mine, reconfigure, rewrite, argue with its characters and author.
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This is a well-researched book that doesn't settle for glib exploitation of fictional ex nihilo WikiLeaks singularity.
Andy Greenberg has invented a gallery of "characters" (me among them) from selected debris of interviews for "This Machine Kills Secrets," an exceptionally informative account of the technical and philosophical global battle for control of communication between lock-step hierarchies of authorities armed with military-grade secrecy and armored with lie-dispensing public relations and diversely distributed, far smarter and agile, anarchical dissidents intending to swarm and undermine official "full-spectrum dominance" of information.
These challengers of abusive control of information see official secrecy as destructive of democracy and unfettered, unspied-upon communication among the citizenry. Their main weapon against the Big Iron Arms of authority (military, espionage, legislation, finance) is pervasive public encryption to protect personal privacy, identity and communication -- supplemented by creative ways to work around authoritative information control and censorship.
Could the Pentagon Papers have been leaked without a photocopier? Though now seen as the most famous leak in U.S. history, and a catalyst for the end of the Vietnam war, the Pentagon Papers did not happen overnight. Far from it, it took Daniel Ellsberg close to a year of tedious nighttime photocopying and daytime pruning (Ellsberg had to remove an Top Secret markings from his documents in order to recopy them for the press at a commercial copy-shop) before he finished the eight foot stack of documents. Today a CD-burner can write fifty times Ellsberg's document haul in minutes.
That's what Bradley Manning is accused using to pull of the biggest leak since Ellsberg -- hundreds of thousands of classified documents on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and a quarter of a million state department cables, all of which eventually ended up in the hands of Wikileaks.
Ellsberg's colleagues at RAND suspected him immediately. Manning might never have been found out, had he not confessed his crime to a hacker named Adrian Lamo, who quickly turned him in.
Too much has been written about Wikileaks and, particularly, the activists and hackers who have sustained and defended it. So it's a welcome relief to come across a book like Andy Greenberg's "This Machine Kills Secrets," which goes beyond the obvious and sketches out the rich cultural and technical history that ultimately made Wikileaks possible.
Greenberg is that rare writer who can breathe life and color into a complex story about technology without embarrassing himself to the geeks.