Barton Gellman Quotes

"In the field of biological weapons, there is almost no prospect of detecting a pathogen until it has been used in an attack."

"'Social engineering,' the fancy term for tricking you into giving away your digital secrets, is at least as great a threat as spooky technology."

"As Trotsky didn't exactly say, you may not be interested in electronic snoops, but snoops are interested in you, whether or not you keep Coke's secret recipe on your iPhone."

"Most computers today have built in backup software."

"At Cheney's initiative, the United States stripped terror suspects of long-established rights under domestic and international law, building a new legal edifice under exclusive White House ownership."

"Enclosed by a sand berm four miles around and 160 feet high, the Baghdad Nuclear Research Facility entombs what remains of reactors bombed by Israel in 1981 and the United States in 1991. It has stored industrial and medical wastes, along with spent reactor fuel."

"For political and bureaucratic reasons, governments at all levels are telling far less to the public than to insiders about how to prepare for and behave in the initial chaos of a mass-casualty event."

"Iraq has the most extensive petrochemical industry in the Middle East and a wealth of vaccine factories, single-cell protein research labs, medical and veterinary manufacturing centers and water treatment plants."

"Smallpox, which spreads by respiration and kills roughly one in three of those infected, took hundreds of millions of lives during a recorded history dating to Pharaonic Egypt. The last case was in 1978, and the disease was declared eradicated on May 8, 1980."

"A national security letter cannot be used to authorize eavesdropping or to read the contents of e-mail. But it does permit investigators to trace revealing paths through the private affairs of a modern digital citizen."

"The Patriot Act unleashed the FBI to search your email, travel and credit records without even a suspicion of wrongdoing."

"I've always shied away from online data storage. I don't even use my employers' network drives for anything sensitive. I want to control access myself."

"Friend of mine, a smart journalist, had his iPad stolen. He couldn't help that - the thief broke into his house. But his private, personal data wasn't stolen, exactly. Donated, more like. He had no passcode set on the iPad."

"I learned the technology and tradecraft of electronic security in self defense, with a lot of expert help."

"I favor pocket-sized hard drives that travel between home and office, syncing with computers on both ends."

"We know what's in our Cheerios and in our retirement accounts because the law requires disclosure."

"Unsettling signs of al Qaeda's aims and skills in cyberspace have led some government experts to conclude that terrorists are at the threshold of using the Internet as a direct instrument of bloodshed."

"You don't need to be a spook to care about encryption. If you travel with your computer or keep it in a place where other people can put their hands on it, you're vulnerable."

"Ghostery lets you spy on the spies in your computer. For each web page you visit, this extension uncloaks some - but not all - of the invisible tracking software that is working behind the scenes."

"I don't say I never use Facebook, but I often think about closing my account."

"A minimum precaution: keep your anti-malware protections up to date, and install security updates for all your software as soon as they arrive."

"Experts said public companies worry about the loss of customer confidence and the legal liability to shareholders or security vendors when they report flaws."

"The IronClad is faster than most thumb drives but far slower than a standard hard drive. Boot up, application launch and other Windows operations feel sluggish, though still usable."

"Counterterrorism analysts have known for years that al Qaeda prepares for attacks with elaborate 'targeting packages' of photographs and notes."

"The U.S. government has known since the early 1990s about Soviet-era smallpox weapons, and collected circumstantial evidence of programs elsewhere."

"Dell fills its computers with crapware, collecting fees from McAfee and other vendors to pre-install 'trial' versions."

"Daniel Ellsberg showed tremendous courage back in the '70s."

"In the urgent aftermath of Sept. 11, 2001, with more attacks thought to be imminent, analysts wanted to use 'contact chaining' techniques to build what the NSA describes as network graphs of people who represented potential threats."

"Nearly all government advice on terrorism sacrifices practical particulars for an unalarming tone. The usual guidance is to maintain a three-day supply of food and water along with a radio, flashlight, batteries and first-aid kit."

"Nothing is absolute in security."