In the soil of ignorance, fear can easily be sown.

We are not naughty children, and the state is not our parent.

Secrecy can be sexy. It's essential to any good mystery novel.

Parliamentarians certainly know how to do bad public relations.

There is risk everywhere. Being alive carries the risk of death.

The royal family are protected from public accountability by law.

The monarchy is a part of the state. It exists to serve the people.

It is scrutiny by the general public that keeps the powerful honest.

Democracy isn't just for people in the Middle East, but Britons, too.

Our printing press is the Internet. Our coffee houses are social networks.

Hackers often describe what they do as playfully creative problem solving.

I'm very optimistic, but I'm optimistic about individuals, not institutions.

The values of WikiLeaks have been completely overshadowed by Julian Assange.

You don't make a system more effective by increasing the number of regulators.

I never thought I would get married. I didn't think I was that type of person.

For information to be useful, it should be dynamic, searchable, and accessible.

A lot of people have a lot to gain from peddling scare stories about cyber 'warfare.'

Politicians often claim secrecy is necessary for good governance or national security.

I'm a freedom of information campaigner, so obviously I support the cause of Wikileaks.

A generation of people are being radicalised by the criminalisation of information sharing.

What the interconnected age in which we live allows us to do is instantly connect with each other.

Britain's legal structure is basically the same as in feudal times: laws are written for the elite.

I know people don't like America very much, but the one thing it's very good on is local government.

The biggest abuses in society happen when people are not able to communicate and not able to connect.

I've always worked on the fringe of the British press establishment, carving out this niche for myself.

It used to cost money to disclose and distribute information. In the digital age it costs money not to.

The movement towards radical transparency and accountability has been gaining steam for several decades.

I pine for a return to the type of old-school journalism and the tough newspapermen and women of the Thirties.

The hacker community may be small, but it possesses the skills that are driving the global economies of the future.

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.

Traditional publishers require an author to submit a manuscript six months in advance, and if pressed, no later than two or three.

I trained as a journalist in America where paying sources is frowned upon. Now I work in the U.K. where there is a more flexible attitude.

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.

In whose interest is it to hype up the collapse of the Internet from a DDoS attack? Why, the people who provide cyber security services, of course.

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.

We pay a lot for our court service, but it's not enough. Courts are under-resourced, which leads to delayed justice - particularly in criminal courts.

You can't hope for a better result as a campaigner than to have the prime minister announce a major policy change within 48 hours of your documentary.

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.

If you don't think there is any value in the work I, or any other serious journalists do, then don't spend your money on it. At least you have the choice.

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.

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.

A lack of government oversight hasn't hindered the Internet. Quite the opposite. A hands-off approach is largely responsible for its fantastic growth and success.

Unwarranted search and seizure by the government officials was unacceptable to the American revolutionaries. Shouldn't it be unacceptable in the digital age, too?

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.

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.

When I was 26 or 27, I gave up journalism. I came to England after my mom died, to let serendipity take its course. And I just found myself back in journalism again.

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.

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.

Slightly embarrassing admission: Even when I was a kid, I used to have these little spy books, and I would, like, see what everybody was doing in my neighborhood and log it down.

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.

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