Words matter. These are the best Heather Brooke Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
There’s a temptation not to vote at all as a protest, but it’s definitely not a protest. In fact, all it does is keep the people in power in power, and I don’t think they should be.
We are not naughty children, and the state is not our parent.
The hacker community may be small, but it possesses the skills that are driving the global economies of the future.
What the interconnected age in which we live allows us to do is instantly connect with each other.
Hackers often describe what they do as playfully creative problem solving.
When it comes to reforming MPs’ expenses, the answer is simply to keep it simple: show us receipts as they’re claimed and, where there are abuses, enforce the law.
Leaks are not the problem; they are the symptom. They reveal a disconnect between what people want and need to know and what they actually do know. The greater the secrecy, the more likely a leak.
Digitization is certainly challenging the old ways of doing things, whether that’s in publishing or politics. But it’s not the end. In many ways, it is just the beginning.
In Britain, it’s bred into you, the idea that you can’t really change anything, so why bother. When I went to school in America, it was the total opposite view – you, as an individual, can change anything and everything. It’s how you’re raised.
I’ve always worked on the fringe of the British press establishment, carving out this niche for myself.
Newspapers are not free and they never have been. They can appear to be so, but someone, somewhere is covering the costs whether that is through advertising, a patron’s largesse or a license fee. Advertising is no longer subsidising the industry and so the cost must fall somewhere – why not on the people who use it?
If Anonymous and Lulzsec are the id of hacking, then physical hackerspaces are the heart of the higher-minded hacking ideals: freedom of information, meritocracy of ideas, a joy of learning and anti-authoritarianism.
My parents are British but they emigrated to America, where I was born.
In the soil of ignorance, fear can easily be sown.
There’s a lot of hand-wringing going on about the death of journalism and particularly the death of investigative journalism. What I see is that there is more need than ever to have experienced information processors – people who can look through this mass of data.
There is a very intense culture of secrecy in Britain that hasn’t yet been dismantled. What passes for transparency here would serve any secret society well.
I never thought I would get married. I didn’t think I was that type of person.
The monarchy is a part of the state. It exists to serve the people.
What the Internet has done is it has decentralised power.
Diplomacy has always involved dinners with ruling elites, backroom deals and clandestine meetings. Now, in the digital age, the reports of all those parties and patrician chats can be collected in one enormous database. And once collected in digital form, it becomes very easy for them to be shared.
It is quite surreal having a film made about your life. The whole process of turning real life into drama is interesting in itself, but even more so when it is your own life being put into the narrative forge.
The values of WikiLeaks have been completely overshadowed by Julian Assange.
Democracy isn’t just for people in the Middle East, but Britons, too.
If you really believe in a cause, let the cause speak for itself. And if you, by your personality, are damaging that cause, if you really believe in it, you step aside.
The speed with which WikiLeaks went from niche interest to global prominence was a real-time example of the revolutionizing power of the digital age in which information can spread instantly across the globe through networked individuals.
Whether I’ll get the chance to write fiction, I don’t know. I could do political conspiracy thrillers, couldn’t I? With an investigative journalist as the heroine.
A lot of people have a lot to gain from peddling scare stories about cyber ‘warfare.’
For information to be useful, it should be dynamic, searchable, and accessible.
If the public can’t see justice being done, or afford the costs of justice, then the entire system becomes little more than a cozy club solely for the benefit of judges, lawyers and their lackeys, a sort of care in the community for the upper middle classes.
You don’t make a system more effective by increasing the number of regulators.
Parliamentarians certainly know how to do bad public relations.
It is scrutiny by the general public that keeps the powerful honest.
Secrecy can be sexy. It’s essential to any good mystery novel.
Public relations is at best promotion or manipulation, at worst evasion and outright deception. What it is never about is a free flow of information.
I’m very optimistic, but I’m optimistic about individuals, not institutions.
We need to codify our values and build consensus around what we want from a free society and a free Internet. We need to put into law protections for our privacy and our right to speak and assemble.
When you’re a crime reporter, you see the nub of what life’s about, and you don’t have much patience for the falsity of politics.
CCTV is seen either as a symbol of Orwellian dystopia or a technology that will lead to crime-free streets and civil behaviour. While arguments continue, there is very little solid data in the public domain about the costs, quantity and effectiveness of surveillance.
Britain’s legal structure is basically the same as in feudal times: laws are written for the elite.
Politicians often claim secrecy is necessary for good governance or national security.
People are used to getting a lot of information quickly, and they’re used to being quite empowered as consumers, and they go to governments expecting a similar treatment; they want to find data and they want to influence events quickly, and yet they come into this brick wall.
I’m a freedom of information campaigner, so obviously I support the cause of Wikileaks.
When journalism is treated as just another widget in a commercial enterprise, the focus isn’t on truth, verification or public good, but productivity and output.
If any of us were faced with a huge bag of free money and very little accountability, it would be human nature that you would make the most of it.
As the news agenda goes into warp speed, it becomes ever more difficult for authors writing about current events to keep their books timely and relevant.
