Barton Gellman Quotes

#1. The NSA has different reporting requirements for each branch of government and each of its legal authorities.

Barton Gellman

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

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#3. 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.

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#4. Privacy and encryption work, but it's too easy to make a mistake that exposes you.

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#5. Privacy is relational. It depends on the audience. You don't want your employer to know you're job hunting. You don't spill all about your love life to your mom or your kids. You don't tell trade secrets to your rivals.

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#6. It turns out that American Express honors recurring payments even if the vendor is unable to supply an accurate card number and expiration date. An Amex phone representative said this is a feature, not a bug, which makes sure my bills are paid.

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#7. In computer circles, any unencrypted data is known as 'cleartext.'

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#8. Scores of armed antigovernment groups, some of them far more radical, have formed or been revived during the Obama years, according to law-enforcement agencies and outside watchdogs.

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#9. Activists and geeks, standing together, are demonstrating powers beyond the reach of government control.

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#10. There is evidence that some of al Qaeda's nuclear efforts over the years met with swindles and false leads.

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#11. There's a long history of private-company cooperation with the NSA that dates back to at least the 1970s.

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#12. Ordinary Geiger counters, worn on belt clips and resembling pagers, have been in use by the U.S. Customs Service for years.

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#13. There is no reliable way to calculate from the number of recorded compliance issues how many Americans have had their communications improperly collected, stored or distributed by the NSA.

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#14. When the 'New York Times' revealed the warrantless surveillance of voice calls, in December 2005, the telephone companies got nervous.

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#15. 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.

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#16. The federal government is often said in militia circles to have made wholesale seizures of power, at times by subterfuge. A leading grievance holds that the 16th Amendment, which authorizes the federal income tax, was ratified through fraud.

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#17. Drug manufacturers could afford to sell AIDS drugs in Africa at virtually any discount. The companies said they did not do so because Africa lacked the requisite infrastructure.

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#18. Leaders at the top of al Qaeda's hierarchy, the evidence shows, completed plans and obtained the materials required to manufacture two biological toxins - botulinum and salmonella - and the chemical poison cyanide.

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#19. Snowden is an orderly thinker, with an engineer's approach to problem-solving.

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#20. In the wealthy industrialized nations, effective drug therapies against AIDS became available - AZT as early as 1987, then combinations of antiretroviral agents in 1996. The new drugs offered hope that fatal complications might be staved off and AIDS rendered a chronic condition.

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#21. It was one thing to say the president's politically appointed lawyers green-lighted domestic surveillance. It was another to claim a go-ahead from career civil servants, unbeholden to the White House.

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#22. The U.N. Security Council ordered Iraq in April 1991 to relinquish all capabilities to make biological, chemical and nuclear weapons as well as long-range missiles.

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#23. True net-heads sometimes resort to punctuation cartoons to get around the absence of inflection.

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#24. Holding our own government to account for the use of its power is, in my view, the highest mission of a U.S. news organization.

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#25. I don't think Cheney started off in 2000 with a burning desire to become vice-president. I think the prospect gradually became more appealing, and he goosed the process.

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#26. Sudan expelled bin Laden on May 18, 1996, to Afghanistan.

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

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#28. Google appears to be the worst of the major search engines from a privacy point of view; Ask, with AskEraser turned on, is among the best.

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#29. Governors normally have jurisdiction over public health emergencies, but a widespread biological attack would cross state boundaries.

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#30. Given the volume of PC sales and the way McAfee runs its operation, I imagine there must be thousands of phantom subscribers - folks who signed up once upon a time and left the software behind two or three computers ago.

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#31. 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.

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#32. Well-secured files don't do you much good if you lose them in a fire or hard drive crash.

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#33. Stuxnet, a computer worm reportedly developed by the United States and Israel that destroyed Iranian nuclear centrifuges in attacks in 2009 and 2010, is often cited as the most dramatic use of a cyber weapon.

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#34. It no longer counts as remarkable that Egyptians organized their uprising on social media.

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#35. The funny thing is that Dick Cheney has done more than anybody in the White House for quite a long time to throw up roadblocks against future historians.

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

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#37. The best way to preserve your privacy is to use a search engine that does not keep your logs in the first place. That's the approach used by Startpage and its European parent company, Ixquick.

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#38. CloudShield did not see itself as a cloak-and-dagger company. It made its name for high-end hardware that could peer deeply into Internet traffic and pull out and analyze 'packets' of data as they flew by.

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#39. U.S. surveillance of Pakistan extends far beyond its nuclear program. There are several references in the black budget to expanding U.S. scrutiny of chemical and biological laboratories.

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#40. Some misunderstandings are hard to cure.

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#41. Doctrines don't govern policy. They provide a conceptual framework by which policymakers approach their decisions. But there is no such thing as a doctrine that controls policy in every way.

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#42. Throughout the early and mid-1990s, the Clinton administration debated the merits of paying for AIDS testing and counseling of vulnerable populations overseas.

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#43. Scott Ritter is a very well-known archetype of a certain U.S. military officer. Very hard talking, very ambitious, zealous, and completely consumed with carrying out his mission. He's a guy who, throughout his career, I would say, did not break rules, but he worked around road blocks.

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#44. The first time I set out to find George F. Kennan, in 1982, I had just turned 21, begun my final semester at Princeton University and noticed with astonishment that the senior thesis deadline had crept to within four months.

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

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#46. Iraq has, in effect, one export of any consequence. That's oil.

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#47. I have no evidence of any relationship between IRS and NSA.

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#48. All Americans are dependent for their energy on the Arabian peninsula.

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#49. 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.

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#50. 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.

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#51. U.S. intelligence services routinely use collection methods against foreigners that foreseeably - with certainty - ingest high volumes of U.S. communications as well.

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#52. Most computers today have built in backup software.

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

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#54. 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.

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#55. Al Qaeda is closely aligned with the Chechens.

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

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#57. 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.

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#58. The United States, a signatory to the Chemical Weapons Convention, destroyed the last of its stocks of VX and other chemical agents on the Johnston Atoll, 825 miles southwest of Hawaii, in November 2000.

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#59. 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.

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#60. 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.

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#61. 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.

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#62. If you do write down your passwords, don't make it obvious which password corresponds to which account. Even better, write the passwords incorrectly and make up an easy rule for fixing them. You could decide to add 1 to each number in your password, so that 2x6Y is written as 3x7Y.

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#63. The first reports of AIDS closely followed the inauguration of President Ronald Reagan, whose 'family values' agenda and alliance with Christian conservatives associated AIDS with deviance and sin.

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#64. Obama's ascendancy unhinged the radical right, offering a unified target to competing camps of racial, nativist and religious animus.

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#65. The government of Sudan, employing a back channel direct from its president to the Central Intelligence Agency, offered in the early spring of 1996 to arrest Osama bin Laden and place him in Saudi custody, according to officials and former officials in all three countries.

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

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#67. The modern era of continuity planning began under President Ronald Reagan.

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#68. Most people inside the bureau believe that the blown opportunities to head off 9/11 would not recur today. Even among the FBI's doubters, few disagree that the bureau has come a long way.

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#69. I do read licenses, and they aggravate me, but a computer isn't much good without software. When I need a product, I hold my nose and click 'agree.'

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#70. The NSA's business is 'information dominance,' the use of other people's secrets to shape events.

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#71. In general, states do not count on pledges of 'no more war' from their neighbors. Israel's army never counted on it from Egypt, for example.

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#72. The surveillance of ordinary people is far greater than I would have imagined and far greater than the American public has been able to debate.

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#73. For months, Obama administration officials attacked Snowden's motives and said the work of the NSA was distorted by selective leaks and misinterpretations.

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#74. If Iraq had succeeded in spray-drying anthrax spores to extend their life and lethality, that would have been among the most important secrets of its wide-ranging weapons program.

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

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#76. Pakistan has accepted some security training from the CIA, but U.S. export restrictions and Pakistani suspicions have prevented the two countries from sharing the most sophisticated technology for safeguarding nuclear components.

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#77. Why does it appear that interested readers so often attribute flaws to 'the press' rather than taking particular issue with particular reports?

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#78. No one ought to be under any illusion that Cheney privately thinks himself a failure.

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#79. Snowden has been very sparing about discussing his early life or his personal life.

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#80. 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.

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#81. White House officials acknowledge in broad terms that a president's time and public rhetoric are among his most valuable policy tools.

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

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#83. The NSA is forbidden to 'target' American citizens, green-card holders or companies for surveillance without an individual warrant from a judge.

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#84. During the morning rush hour on March 20, 1995, the Japanese cult Aum Shinrikyo placed packages on five subway trains converging on Tokyo's central station. When punctured, the packages spread vaporized Sarin through the subway cars and then into the stations as the trains pulled in.

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#85. Clinton saw himself much more as the steward of alliances and of consensus that moved in the right direction. He didn't see himself as someone who could change the overall thrust, I think, of global policy.

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

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#87. NoScript is probably the most important privacy tool, but it costs you in convenience.

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#88. 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.

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#89. For personal use, I recommend the free and open-source Truecrypt, which comes in flavors for Windows, Mac and Linux.

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#90. The causes and severity of NSA infractions vary widely. One in 10 incidents is attributed to a typographical error in which an analyst enters an incorrect query and retrieves data about U.S phone calls or emails.

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#91. Federal prosecutors want to indict Julian Assange for making public a great many classified documents.

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

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#93. 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.

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#94. China and Russia are regarded as the most formidable cyber threats.

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#95. The first and pivotal negotiations over global access to AIDS drugs began in Geneva in 1991. They lasted two years, but confidential minutes suggest they were doomed the first day.

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#96. I'm a journalist and author. I make my living by finding things out and writing about them.

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#97. Palestinians have had to live for a long time with the fact that Israelis had power over them in their everyday lives.

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#98. In effect, you cannot stop Iraq from growing nasty bugs in the basement. You can stop them from putting operational warheads on working missiles and launching them at their neighbors.

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#99. NSA surveillance is a complex subject - legally, technically and operationally.

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

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