This Machine Kills Secrets

This book provides an enthralling and well-balanced look into the recent history of transparency and freedom of information in the age of information. Presents the story in an easy-to-read and engaging manner. Great follow-up books would be Cypherpunks (Assange) and No Place to Hide (Greenwald, on Snowden).

From the reviewer at Publishers Weekly: "According to national security officials, the rise of the cypherpunks and other high-tech activists now pose the greatest threat to this country's defense..." Well, the whistleblower Edward Snowden and his vast leaks on NSA programs certainly alters that thesis! A truly extraordinary book. If you understand why, when a French firm sells spyware to the Ghaddafi government to uncover activists for torture and death, when a British firm sells spyware to Muburak's Egyptian regime to uncover pro-democracy activists for torture and death, or why an American firm, Narus (subsidiary of Boeing), sells spyware to China to uncover pro-democracy activists to be disappeared in that country, you'll begin to understand the importance of Greenberg's book --- he gets everything right! Andy covers the salient, and correct, facts underlying WikiLeaks, the cypherpunk movement, and how privacy on the Internet can have deadly outcomes when it is breeched. This book is the best of the best (and I normally don't say positive things about Forbes' writers). [FYI: Julian Assange and Jacob Appelbaum are basically street kids, Jacob's father was a heroin junkie, and he grew up on the streets of NYC and LA, a self-taught technoid genius, and Assange had a minimal existence in Australia, another self-taught tech genius - - neither one a highly advantaged youth, like the authors covering their stories!]