Top 88 Barton Gellman Quotes

Cloud services cut both ways in terms of security: you get off-site backup and disaster recovery, but you entrust your secrets to somebody else’s hands. Doing the latter increases your exposure to government surveillance and the potential for deliberate or inadvertent breaches of your confidential files.

In 1995, Glaxo bought Burroughs Wellcome and became the presumptive leader in AIDS therapy.

Among all the upheavals of war with al Qaeda, the surest indicator of the historic stakes is the ongoing rotation of top U.S. government managers – scores at a time – into a bunker deep underground and far from Washington.

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.

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

NSA surveillance is a complex subject – legally, technically and operationally.

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.

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

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

Everyone and his Big Brother wants to log your browsing habits, the better to build a profile of who you are and how you live your life – online and off. Search engine companies offer a benefit in return: more relevant search results. The more they know about you, the better they can tailor information to your needs.

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.

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.

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.

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

In Africa through the 1990s, with notable exceptions in Senegal and Uganda, nearly all the ruling powers denied they had a problem with AIDS.

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.

The $52.6 billion U.S. intelligence arsenal is aimed mainly at unambiguous adversaries, including al-Qaida, North Korea and Iran. But top-secret budget documents reveal an equally intense focus on one purported ally: Pakistan.

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

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.

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.’

Early in 1986, the World Health Organization in Geneva still regarded AIDS as an ailment of the promiscuous few.

Unsettling signs of al Qaeda’s aims and skills in cyberspace have led some government experts to conclude that terrorists are at the threshold of using the Internet as a direct instrument of bloodshed.

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.

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

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

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.

The gravest risks from al Qaeda combine its affinity for big targets and its announced desire for weapons of mass destruction.

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.

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.

I doubt there’s any government in the world that guides itself primarily by strategy or conceptual documents or worldview. Anybody who has the reins of power has to look at practical limitations and tradeoffs – the fact that you can focus at most on one or two things at a time, that resources are limited.

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

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

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.

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

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.

Pakistan has dozens of laboratories and production and storage sites scattered across the country. After developing warheads with highly enriched uranium, it has more recently tried to do the same with more-powerful and compact plutonium.

The IronClad is faster than most thumb drives but far slower than a standard hard drive. Boot up, application launch and other Windows operations feel sluggish, though still usable.

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

Al Qaeda is closely aligned with the Chechens.

Nothing is absolute in security.

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

Iraq has, in effect, one export of any consequence. That’s oil.

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.

On March 12, 2004, acting attorney general James B. Comey and the Justice Department’s top leadership reached the brink of resignation over electronic surveillance orders that they believed to be illegal.

No one can keep track of how many people use Internet, how many machines it can reach, or even how many sub- and sub-sub-networks form a part of it.

First developed as a weapon by the U.S. Army, VX is an oily, odorless and tasteless liquid that kills on contact with the skin or when inhaled in aerosol form. Like other nerve agents, it is treatable in the first minutes after exposure but otherwise leads swiftly to fatal convulsions and respiratory failure.

Some misunderstandings are hard to cure.

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

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

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.

The NSA’s business is ‘information dominance,’ the use of other people’s secrets to shape events.

As militias go, the Ohio Defense Force is on the moderate side.

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

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

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

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

At the height of Iraq’s clandestine nuclear weapons program, which nearly succeeded in building a bomb in 1991, Tuwaitha incorporated research reactors, uranium mining and enrichment facilities, chemical engineering plants and an explosives fabrication center to build the device that detonates a nuclear core.