This Machine Kills Secrets
Julian Assange, the Cypherpunks, and Their Fight to Empower Whistleblowers
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Descripción editorial
At last, the first full account of the cypherpunks who aim to free the world’s institutional secrets, by Forbes journalist Andy Greenberg who has traced their shadowy history from the cryptography revolution of the 1970s to Wikileaks founding hacker Julian Assange, Anonymous, and beyond.
WikiLeaks brought to light a new form of whistleblowing, using powerful cryptographic code to hide leakers’ identities while they spill the private data of government agencies and corporations. But that technology has been evolving for decades in the hands of hackers and radical activists, from the libertarian enclaves of Northern California to Berlin to the Balkans. And the secret-killing machine continues to evolve beyond WikiLeaks, as a movement of hacktivists aims to obliterate the world’s institutional secrecy.
This is the story of the code and the characters—idealists, anarchists, extremists—who are transforming the next generation’s notion of what activism can be.
With unrivaled access to such major players as Julian Assange, Daniel Domscheit-Berg, and WikiLeaks’ shadowy engineer known as the Architect, never before interviewed, reporter Andy Greenberg unveils the world of politically-motivated hackers—who they are and how they operate.
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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, a principal theme in this detailed look into superhackers by Greenberg, a staff writer for Forbes magazine. Greenberg includes a rogues' list of the hackers and cypherpunks who have decided to reveal classified materials and confront the might of the U.S. government, including Pentagon Papers' Daniel Ellsberg, leaker U.S. Army Pvt. Bradley Manning, code visionaries Tim May and Phil Zimmerman, cypherpunk cofounder Eric Hughes, and Wikileaks cofounder Julian Assange. Leaked secrets have covered such things as dark military secrets, Wall Street mishaps, personal moral defects, and executive coverups. While somewhat focusing on Assange and the inner workings of the secretive Wikileaks, he fully examines the historic development of cryptographic code and online whistle-blowing, along with the ongoing skirmish of NSA vs. the dedicated hackers over the years. With complete access to many of the key hackers and leakers, 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.
