This Machine Kills Secrets
How Wikileakers, Cypherpunks, and Hacktivists Aim to Free the World's Information
2012
First Published
4.01
Average Rating
384
Number of Pages
The barbarians aren't at the gates. They're inside. This is the first full account of the cypherpunks who aim to free the world's information, from the Forbes reporter whose work has traced their history and future. What is the machine that kills secrets? 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
Avg Rating
4.01
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1,173
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Author
Andy Greenberg
Author · 4 books
Andy Greenberg is an award-winning senior writer for WIRED, covering security, privacy, information freedom, and hacker culture. He's the author of the forthcoming book SANDWORM: A New Era of Cyberwar and the Hunt for the Kremlin's Most Dangerous Hackers. Greenberg's reporting for WIRED on Ukraine's cyberwar (including an excerpt from SANDWORM) have won a Gerald Loeb Award for International Reporting and two Deadline Club Awards from the New York Society of Professional Journalists. Greenberg's last book was THIS MACHINE KILLS SECRETS, about WikiLeaks, cryptography, and the cypherpunks, which was selected as an Editor's Choice by The New York Times Book Review in 2012. Before coming to WIRED, Greenberg worked as a senior reporter for Forbes magazine. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife, filmmaker Malika Zouhali-Worrall.
