This Machine Kills Secrets: How WikiLeakers, Hacktivists, and Cypherpunks Are Freeing the World's Information

Andy Greenberg

Sep 2012 · Random House

About this ebook

Young men and women who grew up in the digital age are expressing their dissatisfaction with governments, the military and corporations in a radically new way. They are building machines - writing cryptographic software codes - that are designed to protect the individual in a cloak of anonymity, while institutional secrets are uploaded for public consumption. This movement is shining a light on governments' classified documents and exposing abuses of power like never before.

From Australia to Iceland - organisations like Wikileaks, Openleaks, and Anonymous are just some of the more familiar groups that are enabling whistleblowers and transforming the next generation's notion of what activism can be. The revolution won't be televised. It'll be online.

Andy Greenberg, technology writer for Forbes magazine, has interviewed all the major players in this new era of activism including Julian Assange - and blows the cover of a key activist, previously only presumed to exist, named The Architect who accomplished for at least two leak sites exactly what his name implies.

In This Machine Kills Secrets, Greenberg offers a vision of a world in which institutional secrecy no longer protects those in power - from big banks to dysfunctional governments. A world that digital technology has made all but inevitable.

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About the author

Andy Greenberg has covered cyber security and privacy for Forbes since 2007. Based in New York, Greenberg's reporting has taken him from an autonomous car race in the California desert to Beijing, where he first cut his teeth as a freelance journalist in 2004. Most recently, Greenberg's travels have taken him to Iceland and London, where he produced the world's first cover story on WikiLeaks' Julian Assange.