This Machine Kills Secrets - Any Greenberg

Here’s a summary of the prologue:

• In November 2010, Andy Greenberg interviews Julian Assange in London.

• Assange discusses his view that for efficient markets to function, there must be perfect information. He says that WikiLeaks identifies “lemons,” referring to companies engaged in unethical behavior, in order to improve information in the market.

• Assange tells Greenberg that WikiLeaks plans to release tens of thousands of e-mails from a major U.S. bank in early 2011 exposing corporate corruption and malfeasance.

• Though Assange does not name the bank, speculation that it is Bank of America causes the company’s stock price to drop by $3.5 billion.

• This shows Assange at the height of his power, demonstrating WikiLeaks’ ability to significantly impact major companies and markets through the threat of releasing secret information.

• Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, met with the author in 2010 and hinted at an upcoming “megaleak” that would affect private corporations and governments.

• However, the promised bank leak never materialized. WikiLeaks struggled in the following years, facing financial troubles and legal issues. Assange himself faced potential criminal charges and seemed more focused on hosting a TV show than running WikiLeaks.

• Despite WikiLeaks’ struggles, the idea of digitally leaking secrets to expose wrongdoing has inspired many. The means and technology to leak information have been evolving for decades. Today, the vast amount of digital data in the world makes secrets very “leakable.”

• The key to modern leaking is anonymity, which depends on cryptography. WikiLeaks showed how anonymity tools that hide metadata can be used to leak information while protecting the source.

• Powerful anonymity tools took a long time to develop but were crucial to WikiLeaks’ model of leaking. They allow leakers to disclose secrets without revealing their identity.

• There is an ongoing debate about anonymity on the internet. Some say true anonymity is impossible, while others argue anonymity tools are still effective and important to enable leaking and transparency.

• The story of leaked secrets, from the Pentagon Papers to today, shows how the drive to expose the truth has combined with technology to create a powerful movement. WikiLeaks and its descendants represent the spirit of digitally enabled transparency and the fight for anonymity and privacy online.

In summary, the key ideas are:

1. WikiLeaks showed the potential of digitally enabled leaking and inspired many, despite its own struggles.

2. Anonymity is essential to the modern leaking movement. Cryptographic tools that hide metadata make leaking possible.

3. There is an ongoing debate around anonymity and privacy online. They remain crucial for enabling leakers and transparency.

4. The story of leaked secrets illustrates a decades-long fight for truth, anonymity, and privacy that continues today. WikiLeaks represents the spirit of that movement.

• In 1969, Daniel Ellsberg wanted to leak the Pentagon Papers, a secret government report on the Vietnam War. However, photocopying technology was new and limited. Ellsberg had to manually photocopy 7,000 pages, which took over a year.

• Ellsberg recruited friends and family to help photocopy the documents in secret. They had to cut off classified markings and dodge police who frequently investigated the office where they were working. The entire process was tedious, time-consuming, and expensive.

• In contrast, Bradley Manning’s leaks of hundreds of thousands of classified documents in 2010 were much easier thanks to modern technology. Manning simply copied the documents to a CD labeled as a music CD and carried them out of his workplace. The scale and ease of Manning’s leaks demonstrated how much technology had changed since Ellsberg’s time.

• While Ellsberg’s and Manning’s leaks were separated by decades, they were both driven by a desire to expose government secrets about controversial wars. However, the means by which they accomplished their leaks were vastly different, highlighting how technology has enabled whistleblowers and made large-scale leaks much more feasible.

Daniel Ellsberg was born in 1931 into an upper-middle-class family. He admired his uncle, a navy admiral and author. Ellsberg was a top student but was forced by his mother to devote most of his time to studying piano. After a car accident killed his mother and sister, Ellsberg was freed from this restriction and began reading voraciously. He went to Harvard, married his college girlfriend, and studied at Cambridge University.

Ellsberg enlisted in the Marines during the Korean War but spent two years training and never saw combat. Early in his military career, he received top-secret security clearances. Ellsberg told Henry Kissinger that these clearances initially gave him a thrill of access to secret information but soon made him feel foolish for his previous ignorance and disdainful of others’ ignorance. Eventually, he realized these secrets also blinded and misled him. He compared them to a potion that turned men into swine, unable to help each other.

Bradley Manning had a very different background. He grew up in Oklahoma and Wales with his alcoholic parents, struggled in school, and was often bullied. He joined the Army to gain skills and direction. He was assigned to work as an intelligence analyst in Iraq, where he had access to secret data on military computers. Unlike Ellsberg, who spent years gaining higher security clearances, Manning’s access seems to have come almost immediately.

Manning leaked vast amounts of data by copying it to rewritable CDs and lip-synced to Lady Gaga’s “Telephone” while doing so. The leaks included data on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Guantanamo prisoners, and State Department communications—altogether far more data than Ellsberg leaked. Ellsberg’s leak took years of meticulous photocopying, while Manning’s took little time using modern technology. At Ellsberg’s rate, leaking data equivalent to Manning’s could have taken 18 years. The contrast shows how much easier large-scale leaks have become in the digital age.

• Bradley Manning grew up in Crescent, Oklahoma, a very small and conservative town. He was a bright child who learned to read at a young age, built his first website at 10, and won multiple science fairs. However, he also questioned religion and authority from an early age. His neighbors described him as a quiet, good-natured boy who studied hard and played in the band.

• Manning’s father, Brian, was often away for work. Manning’s mother, Susan, struggled with alcoholism. When Manning was 13, his parents separated, and Manning moved with his mother to Haverfordwest, Wales. Manning had trouble fitting in there and faced bullying and teasing. He was very patriotic but politically liberal. He spent a lot of time on computers and the Internet.

• After high school, Manning moved back to Oklahoma to live with his father. He worked at a software startup but struggled and was eventually fired. He drifted between jobs and places to live. Unable to afford college, he enlisted in the army in 2007 at his father’s urging. Though Manning opposed the Iraq War, his father pushed him to join the military to gain structure and direction.

• Daniel Ellsberg was a military analyst who studied decision theory. He spent years studying the Vietnam War, but realized the documents didn’t reflect the reality on the ground. In 1965, he took a job with the State Department and traveled to Vietnam as an observer. Though a civilian, he carried weapons for protection and traveled the countryside, gaining insight into the war. He was mentored by John Vann, a retired army officer who drove him around so Ellsberg could understand the “real truths of the war.”

• Daniel Ellsberg was a military analyst who turned against the Vietnam War after witnessing the reality on the ground during a fact-finding mission in 1966-67. He found that official reports were overly optimistic and did not match what he saw. He concluded the war was unwinnable.

• Ellsberg’s pessimism was confirmed when he read the Pentagon Papers, a secret government report on the war. He found that the U.S. had orchestrated the war for decades to serve its own geopolitical interests, not to help the Vietnamese people. Successive presidents had lied to expand and continue the war.

• Ellsberg’s determination to end the war solidified after meeting Randy Kehler, an antiwar activist who was going to prison for resisting the draft. Kehler’s courage and conviction moved Ellsberg to act. Ellsberg vowed to do whatever he could to end the war, even if it meant going to prison himself.

• Like Ellsberg, Bradley Manning had access to secret information as an intelligence analyst, but little power to change the course of events. Manning was demoted and disciplined for various incidents. He was struggling with his sexuality and mental health issues. But he retained access to classified data.

• In summary, Ellsberg and Manning were insiders who turned against the institutions they served after gaining knowledge that led them to believe grave injustices were being committed. Lacking power to create change through official channels, they became whistleblowers.

• Bradley Manning was a U.S. Army intelligence analyst who leaked classified information to WikiLeaks.

• While on leave from Iraq, Manning struggled with his gender identity and desire to become female (Breanna Manning). This personal struggle coincided with a growing disillusionment with the military.

• Manning’s “turning point” came when he investigated the arrest of Iraqi civilians who had written a scholarly critique of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. Manning reported the situation to his superiors but was told to ignore it. This made Manning realize he was “part of something” he was “completely against.”

• Manning began leaking classified information, including State Department cables and the infamous “Collateral Murder” video showing a U.S. military helicopter attack killing civilians in Iraq. Manning felt this information showed the “crazy, almost criminal” nature of U.S. foreign policy and diplomacy.

• Adrian Lamo, a hacker, turned Manning in after Manning confessed the leaks to him. Lamo believes Manning is equivalent to major spies like Aldrich Ames and should be punished severely. However, Lamo acknowledges that if Manning had only leaked the helicopter video, Lamo would not have turned him in and may have leaked it himself.

• Lamo argues that Manning is being treated fairly in prison, though others have condemned the treatment as “ridiculous, counterproductive, and stupid.”

• There is some hypocrisy in Lamo turning in Manning for the same radical transparency Lamo promoted as a hacker. However, Lamo claims Manning indiscriminately released too many documents, rather than carefully selecting certain ones to leak like Lamo might have done.

In summary, Manning leaked classified information out of a growing disillusionment with the U.S. government and military. Adrian Lamo turned Manning in, though Lamo likely would have supported leaking select pieces of information like the helicopter video. There are debates around whether Manning’s treatment in prison has been fair and whether Lamo was right to turn in Manning.

• Adrian Lamo is a hacker who Bradley Manning confessed to leaking classified documents to. Lamo turned Manning into the authorities, leading to Manning’s arrest and imprisonment.

• Lamo was once a prominent “homeless hacker” who hacked into major corporations and media organizations to expose their security flaws, but claimed he did so to help them improve their security. He was eventually arrested for hacking into The New York Times and sentenced to house arrest.

• After his house arrest, Lamo became an advocate for ethical hacking and more lenient treatment of hackers. Manning likely thought Lamo would be sympathetic to his leaks, but Lamo turned Manning in. Lamo says he regrets that Manning’s case could not have been resolved in another way.

• The summary then discusses Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the Pentagon Papers to The New York Times in 1971. Ellsberg first tried to have legislators release the papers, but they refused out of fear of controversy. Ellsberg then gave the papers to Neil Sheehan at The New York Times.

• Although Ellsberg took measures to hide his identity, government analysts quickly figured out he was the likely leaker. The Nixon White House also assumed Ellsberg was responsible within days of the leaks. The publication of the Pentagon Papers led to an important legal case regarding freedom of the press.

• The key tension discussed is between the public good that can come from whistleblowing and leaks (exposing government wrongdoing) versus the need for state secrecy. Lamo and Ellsberg believed their leaks served the public good, but they still faced legal consequences for compromising state secrecy. Manning likely believed something similar, but his fate was harsher. The summary suggests these cases show the complex “moral calculus” involved in such situations.

• Daniel Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon Papers, a secret government study on the Vietnam War, to the New York Times in 1971. Although the Nixon administration obtained an injunction to prevent the Times from publishing, Ellsberg leaked the study to other newspapers as well. He was eventually indicted under the Espionage Act.

• Chelsea Manning leaked hundreds of thousands of classified documents to WikiLeaks in 2010, including information on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as well as diplomatic cables. Manning was able to access and leak the documents due to lax security on the military networks and lack of monitoring. The leaks were not detected until Manning confessed to a hacker named Adrian Lamo, who then reported Manning to the authorities.

• Manning took precautions to anonymize the leaks by using encryption and the anonymity network Tor. However, once investigators gained access to Manning’s computers, they found evidence directly tying Manning to the leaks, including chat logs with Julian Assange. If Manning had not confessed the details of the leak to Lamo, the leak may never have been traced back.

• The leaks infuriated President Nixon and the government, leading to an overreaction that aimed to “destroy” Ellsberg in the media. The administration tried Ellsberg in the press and widened its attacks beyond just pursuing legal charges against him.

• In summary, both Ellsberg and Manning were able to carry out massive leaks of classified information due to security weaknesses and a lack of monitoring. However, Manning’s confession to a third party ultimately allowed investigators to identify Manning as the source of the leaks. In both cases, the administrations responded angrily to embarrassing information being made public.

• Daniel Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon Papers in 1971, exposing the US government’s lies about the Vietnam War. He was charged with espionage but the charges were dismissed due to government misconduct.

• Bradley Manning leaked hundreds of thousands of classified documents to WikiLeaks in 2010, including war logs from Iraq and Afghanistan and State Department cables. He was arrested and charged with violating the Espionage Act and aiding the enemy.

• The Obama administration’s treatment of Manning was criticized as inhumane. He was held in solitary confinement for 23 hours a day and forced to strip naked at night. Ellsberg protested Manning’s treatment, saying he identified with Manning.

• However, Obama said Manning’s case was not the same as Ellsberg’s. Ellsberg leaked higher-classified information, and Manning “broke the law.” Ellsberg had privileged access as an elite military leader, whereas Manning was a private first class.

• The government’s tactics against Ellsberg were called “absurd and shameful.” Nixon’s operatives broke into Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office, tried to drug Ellsberg with LSD, and planned to physically assault him. Their crimes were exposed during the Watergate scandal.

• Manning’s confidant, hacker Adrian Lamo, promised confidentiality but then turned Manning into the authorities. Lamo continued chatting with Manning even after contacting the FBI and army counterintelligence.

• Manning’s leak revealed disturbing details about the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, including a video of a US helicopter attack killing civilians. His actions and harsh treatment sparked debates over whistleblowing, overclassification, and government transparency and accountability.

That covers the key highlights and events in the summaries regarding Ellsberg, Manning, Lamo, and the government’s actions against them. Let me know if you would like me to clarify or expand on any part of the summary.

Tim May was a young physicist working at Intel in the 1970s. He helped solve a critical technical problem that was threatening a major contract with AT&T. May realized that the memory chips Intel had provided were sometimes flipping single bits of data, causing software crashes. After some investigation, May theorized that the problem was caused by low levels of radiation from the chips’ ceramic casings. He tested his theory and found that the radiation was corrupting the chips’ data.

Intel fixed the problem by redesigning the chips with less radioactive materials and better shielding. May’s discovery was a major victory for Intel and helped establish it as an innovative company. May was promoted and given more responsibility at Intel, but he disliked the increasing bureaucracy and management focus. Over time, his Intel stock options made him financially independent. In 1986, after a poor performance review, he quit Intel.

May was a brilliant and imaginative physicist, but he was not interested in management or corporate politics. He lived a very simple lifestyle and saved most of the money he earned. Once he had enough money to live on for the rest of his life, he left Intel to pursue his own interests.

• Tim May was 34 years old when he retired in May 2010. He was unsure what to do with the rest of his life after retirement. However, someone named Barrett said May had an imagination and wasn’t constrained by history. A few years later, May’s email signature listed interests like “anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, reputations, information markets, black markets, collapse of governments.”

• In 2010, the author drove to Santa Cruz to meet two important figures in the history of WikiLeaks: Tim May and Philip Zimmermann. The author didn’t expect to actually meet May, who was rumored to be a hermit living in the mountains with claymore mines around his house. However, the author did meet Zimmermann.

• Zimmermann was an anti-nuclear activist who protested at the Nevada nuclear test site in 1987 and was arrested. He was inspired by Daniel Ellsberg, who gave a speech arguing that anti-Vietnam War protests had convinced Nixon not to use nuclear weapons. Zimmermann decided to fight against nuclear weapons rather than move to New Zealand. He spent years educating himself about nuclear issues and taught a class on military history.

• In 1986, Gorbachev declared a moratorium on nuclear testing, hoping the US would do the same. But the US tested another nuclear weapon. So Zimmermann and 400+ others protested at the test site. Although the US had already detonated a bomb, Zimmermann gained experience with civil disobedience. He was poised to take on a new conflict, the “Crypto Wars.”

• As a child, Tim May was fascinated by science and technology. He grew up near observatories and aerospace facilities in 1950s San Diego. His neighbor worked on ICBMs, and May watched Sputnik with him. However, May’s father told him gruesome stories from WWII about bulldozing sand over enemies in bunkers. So May’s childhood also had a grim side.

• May was born into a military family and moved frequently as a child. His father encouraged his interest in science and firearms at a young age.

• May was largely a social outcast and loner, preferring to read about science, technology, and libertarian philosophy. He was particularly influenced by Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged in high school.

• May went to college at UC Santa Barbara during a tumultuous time but focused on his studies. He got a job at Intel after graduating but soon left, disillusioned with corporate life.

• May retired early and became an autodidact, reading voraciously about science, technology, philosophy, and science fiction. He was particularly interested in ideas about anonymity, identity, and information markets.

• When a friend suggested creating an “information exchange” market, May pointed out it would inevitably become a black market for stolen information and trade secrets. However, May then became intrigued by this idea.

• Phil Zimmermann had an unstable childhood, frequently moving between homes. He took solace as a child in cryptography, teaching himself different codes and ciphers. A book on codes and ciphers inspired his early interest in cryptography.

The key ideas are that both May and Zimmermann were socially isolated as children but found refuge in reading and codes, respectively. Their early interests clearly influenced their later work on cryptography and digital privacy.

• Philip Zimmermann was fascinated with cryptography from an early age. He learned simple encryption techniques as a child and created digital versions of them as a college student, though he later found his early efforts had already been cracked by experts.

• In 1977, Zimmermann read an article by Martin Gardner on public key cryptography, a revolutionary new form of encryption that allowed secure communication between two parties without first sharing a secret key. Public key encryption used mathematical techniques to generate a public key for encrypting messages and a private key for decrypting them. The public key could be shared openly without compromising security.

• Gardner suggested the RSA public key encryption scheme created by MIT scientists was essentially unbreakable and could withstand any cryptanalysis, disproving Edgar Allan Poe’s claim that any cipher created by humans could eventually be solved by other humans. Zimmermann was inspired to create a tool to make public key encryption accessible to political activists and dissidents.

• Around the same time, cypherpunk Tim May became fascinated with public key cryptography and saw it as a way to create impenetrable privacy and anonymity. When he learned of Phil Salin’s idea for an anonymous information exchange, May realized encryption could be used to hide not just the content of messages but the identities of the senders and receivers, enabling the anonymous buying, selling, and sharing of secrets.

• In 1981, May read an article by David Chaum proposing digital cash and other anonymous transaction systems. Chaum would become known as the godfather of digital anonymity. His ideas, combined with public key cryptography, showed May how to realize his vision of an anonymous online marketplace.

The key ideas here are that public key cryptography made secure and anonymous communication possible, and this inspired cypherpunks like Zimmermann and May to develop tools to make encryption and anonymity accessible to individuals. They saw the political and social potential in enabling private anonymous transactions.

• David Chaum was a pioneer in cryptography and digital privacy. His ideas influenced generations of cryptographers and privacy advocates.

• Chaum was a precocious child and teenage hacker who was obsessed with security and secrecy. He went on to study computer science at U.C. Berkeley and focused on privacy and security technologies. His advisor disagreed with his focus on the social implications of technology.

• In his seminal 1985 paper “Security without Identification,” Chaum described a system of “digital currencies” and “blind signatures” that would allow for anonymous electronic transactions. This aimed to prevent the mass surveillance and loss of privacy that Chaum foresaw with increasing digitization.

• Chaum’s system involved personal “card computers” that would hold encrypted digital credentials and currencies. “Blind signatures” allowed institutions to cryptographically sign and verify transactions without seeing their contents. This enabled anonymous and untraceable transactions.

• Chaum also proposed a method for anonymous group communication called the Dining Cryptographers Network or DC-Net. This allowed a group to secretly communicate and determine information (like who paid a bill) without revealing who sent any individual message. Chaum showed DC-Net could be expanded to send any digital message anonymously.

• Despite supporting his ideas, Chaum struggled to find mainstream success or partnerships for his company, eCash. Some say this was due to bad luck, while others blame Chaum’s controlling management style. But Chaum’s ideas and patents established him as an influential figure in computer security and privacy.

• David Chaum created a system for anonymous digital transactions called DC-Nets. Tim May saw that this could enable anonymous funding of illegal activities.

• Phil Zimmermann founded a company called Metamorphic Systems that ported Apple software to Intel chips. He became obsessed with cryptography and imagined activists using strong encryption to avoid government surveillance.

• Zimmermann partnered with Charlie Merritt, who had created an implementation of MIT’s public key encryption system that could run on personal computers. Merritt kept being threatened by the NSA over export controls on encryption.

• Zimmermann and Merritt worked together to create Pretty Good Privacy (PGP), an encryption tool. Zimmermann planned to distribute it for free as a tool for activists.

• In 1991, Senator Joe Biden inserted a paragraph into an omnibus crime bill saying that communications companies had to ensure the government could obtain plain text of communications. This showed the government saw encryption as a threat to law enforcement and intelligence.

• Zimmermann saw news of Biden’s addition on a bulletin board and became alarmed. He feared the government would ban or cripple encryption, so he rushed to release PGP widely before that could happen.

The key ideas are:

1. Chaum and May envisioned how encryption could enable anonymous and untraceable digital activities.

2. Zimmermann and Merritt partnered to create the PGP encryption tool with the goal of enabling activists and protesters to avoid government surveillance.

3. The U.S. government saw the spread of strong encryption as a serious threat to law enforcement and intelligence gathering. They tried to ensure they would have access to decrypted communications.

4. In response, Zimmermann rushed to release PGP widely before the government could ban or cripple it.

• Phil Zimmermann created PGP, an encryption software, in 1991. He released it for free on the Internet, allowing people around the world to securely encrypt their communications. This violated arms export control laws in the U.S. at the time.

• The U.S. government investigated Zimmermann for illegally exporting crypto by distributing PGP internationally. Zimmermann was shocked and fearful of years in prison. He hired a lawyer to defend himself.

• Tim May, a former Intel employee, was inspired by David Chaum’s work on digital anonymity and cryptography. He wrote “The Crypto-Anarchist Manifesto” in 1988, envisioning how encryption and anonymity would empower individuals and subvert institutions.

• May struggled to write a science fiction novel expressing his crypto-anarchist ideas. He realized the concepts he imagined were becoming reality faster than he could write about them. He abandoned the novel and decided to build the elaborate digital world he envisioned instead.

• May teamed up with Eric Hughes, a crypto-enthusiast he knew, and John Gilmore, a libertarian hacker and software pioneer. Hughes had previously worked for David Chaum but would not discuss the experience. They were all passionate about using crypto to limit government control.

• Hughes needed a place to stay while looking for a home in the Bay Area. May invited him to stay at his house for a few days. During this time, they likely bonded over their shared interests in crypto, anonymity, and libertarianism.

• Phil Hughes and Tim May met in 1992 and bonded over their shared interests in cryptography, privacy, and building secure communication systems. They organized an informal gathering of like-minded cryptographers and coders at Hughes’s house.

• At the gathering, they came up with a game called “Crypto Anarchy” to demonstrate how encryption and anonymous communication networks, or “remailers,” could be used to evade surveillance. The group was inspired by David Chaum’s idea of “Mix Networks,” in which messages are encrypted multiple times and routed through intermediaries to obscure their origin.

• Impressed with the turnout and energy at the first meeting, Hughes and May decided to create an online community. With help from John Gilmore, they started the Cypherpunk Mailing List. The group began meeting regularly at Gilmore’s company offices, discussing cryptography and politics and organizing activist projects.

• Hughes wrote one of the first anonymous remailers, proving a point to skeptics in the group. He and May also wrote manifestos articulating the Cypherpunk philosophy of building tools to protect privacy and expand freedom. Their rallying cry was “Cypherpunks write code.”

• Within a month of the first Cypherpunk meeting, the U.S. government took actions that would test the group’s resolve. The PGP encryption software had just been released, and the government attempted to restrict its spread. But the Cypherpunks believed that once software exists, it can’t be destroyed, and they were determined to defend privacy through code.

• In 1993, Phil Zimmermann was summoned to testify before Congress about PGP. His lawyers told him he had no chance of winning his case and would likely be indicted.

• Zimmermann hired a criminal defense lawyer named Phil Dubois who disagreed and suggested publicizing the case. Zimmermann agreed and gave many media interviews portraying himself as fighting for civil liberties. The media coverage was universally sympathetic.

• Meanwhile, the Clinton administration introduced the Clipper Chip, an NSA-designed encryption system that allowed government access to encrypted communications. The cypherpunks and cryptography advocates opposed it.

• One cypherpunk, Phil Karn, found a legal loophole. He got export approval for the DES algorithm by first submitting it in book form, then on floppy disk. When denied for the floppy disk, he sued the government.

• Zimmermann then got MIT Press to publish PGP’s source code in book form. When the government didn’t respond to a request to export the book, MIT Press shipped it to Europe, effectively exporting PGP.

• Zimmermann’s legal team planned to use the published source code as a defense if he was indicted. But the Justice Department dropped the investigation with no explanation. The Clipper Chip plan also failed due to public opposition.

• In summary, creative tactics and publicity undermined the government’s attempts to control cryptography and prosecute Phil Zimmermann for creating PGP. The existence of PGP’s source code in printed form was a key part of foiling their efforts.

• In the early 1990s, Phil Zimmermann created PGP, an encryption software that allowed people to securely communicate. The U.S. government opposed its spread and tried to curb its use.

• The “Clipper chip” was a proposed government encryption standard with a backdoor for law enforcement. It was widely opposed and eventually failed. This was a victory for activists fighting for strong encryption and privacy.

• Tim May was an influential “cypherpunk” who spread ideas about encryption, privacy, and anonymity. He proposed a hypothetical anonymous information market called “BlackNet” to show the power of encryption.

• BlackNet was a thought experiment - it didn’t actually exist. But even as a concept, it showed how technology could enable truly anonymous communication and commerce.

• May received an anonymous message with an offer to sell information about CIA spying and government corruption in an African country. But May ignored it, saying he didn’t actually care about such causes - he was more focused on personal liberty.

• Critics argue May could have created something like WikiLeaks if he cared more about social justice. But May says he was more interested in spreading the ideas than directly enacting them.

• John Gilmore, another influential cypherpunk, shared the full archives of the Cypherpunk Mailing List, showcasing the range of ideas that were discussed.

The key themes are:

1. The battle between privacy activists and governments over encryption in the 1990s. Activists largely won, enabling secure and anonymous communication.

2. Tim May’s radical ideas, like BlackNet, that showed the potential of encryption to disrupt power structures. But May himself was more focused on concepts than action.

3. The Cypherpunk Mailing List as an influential forum where these types of ideas were debated and spread.

4. The argument that May could have created something like WikiLeaks if he directed his energy toward activism rather than just libertarian philosophy. But May preferred spreading ideas to directly enacting them.

5. How these concepts and events set the stage for modern debates over privacy, security, and anonymity. The cypherpunks were ahead of their time.

In August 1992, an anonymous person posted an article from an Australian newspaper to the Cypherpunks mailing list about the Australian government selling citizens’ private information to corporations. Julian Assange, a 32-year-old former vice president of the Mathematics and Statistics Society at the University of Melbourne, found this amusing.

Assange was known for his eccentric behavior and distrust of authority. He was opposed to the influence of the military on the university’s campus. To entertain himself, Assange created an elaborate scavenger hunt at the university called “The Puzzle Hunt.” The hunt included complex math and logic problems. Assange approached WikiLeaks, the secret-sharing organization he founded, in a similar playful and subversive manner.

A year after Assange left the university, he emailed former classmates asking them to help with WikiLeaks, describing it as a “courageous project to reform every political system on earth.” A year later, he invited them to help develop an “international leaked document analysis & essay competition” through WikiLeaks. Assange compared this competition to “The Puzzle Hunt,” suggesting it could be an “engine for justice.” However, for Assange, the chaos WikiLeaks could cause may have been as much of a motivation as promoting justice.

• Bruce Sterling, a science fiction writer, described WikiLeaks as homemade nitroglycerin that cypherpunks had been experimenting with for years. Julian Assange was the one who finally ignited it.

• John Young, who runs the website Cryptome, is a strange and paranoid character. He publishes thousands of leaked documents but provides little context or explanation. He says Cryptome publishes “imaginatory material” and shouldn’t be trusted.

• Young has published sensitive information like the names of intelligence agents and Dick Cheney’s bunker plans. He receives leaks via email and postal mail but promises leakers no real anonymity or protection. He told Yahoo! once that “it’s not illegal to be a jerk.”

• Young was an influence on WikiLeaks and at one point even registered the WikiLeaks domain name. Although Cryptome doesn’t recommend specific anonymity tools, leakers have continued submitting documents to the site for years.

• As a teenager, Julian Assange acted strangely to convince anyone watching that he was crazy. He printed and read passages from Macbeth, asked himself questions and stomped around the room. This was likely to ensure his family’s refugee status in Australia.

• In summary, John Young and Cryptome helped lay the groundwork for radical transparency sites like WikiLeaks. Although Young is an eccentric character, his site receives and publishes leaks that governments and companies would prefer to keep secret.

• Julian Assange exhibited signs of being very intelligent from an early age but had a troubled childhood, moving frequently and dealing with unstable parental figures.

• As a teenager in the early 1980s, Assange became fascinated with computers and hacking. He formed a hacker group called the International Subversives with two friends.

• Assange broke into many high-profile computer systems, including those of NASA, Lockheed Martin, and the Pentagon. He was motivated by curiosity and a sense of exploration rather than malicious intent. He only sought to access systems, not steal or manipulate data.

• Assange employed methods to avoid detection, including spoofing phone calls to hide his location and covering his digital tracks. However, he was eventually caught by a determined system administrator. Before the admin could identify him, Assange sent a message appearing on the admin’s screen to momentarily shock him.

• There is no indication Assange was in need of antipsychotic medication or exhibited strange behavior. His hacking activities as a teenager, while illegal, were driven by curiosity and a sense of intellectual challenge.

• Julian Assange was an Australian hacker and activist in the 1990s. As a teenager in the 1980s, he hacked into various targets, including Nortel.

• In 1991, Assange’s wife left him, taking their son. Around the same time, Australian Federal Police raided Assange’s home and found hacking evidence, ending his hacking career.

• In 1968, Columbia University students occupied campus buildings to protest the Vietnam War and the university’s ties to military research. John Young, a 32-year-old graduate student, gave a speech that inspired and reinvigorated the student protesters in Avery Hall.

• Young grew up poor in Texas but did not consider himself disadvantaged. He joined the military, then got degrees in architecture and philosophy at Rice University. He worked as an architect, with a focus on vernacular, historic architecture.

• Young was involved in Urban Deadline, a group formed after the 1968 Columbia protests to apply the protesters’ sensibility to architecture, education, and politics. Through Urban Deadline, Young worked to create alternative schools, historic districts, and stop highway construction in poor neighborhoods.

• As an architect, Young often reported building code violations and unsafe conditions, though he was frequently ignored. He considered this part of an architect’s responsibility.

• Two decades after 1968, Young became involved with the cypherpunks, rediscovering his spirit of activism and antiauthoritarianism.

• Assange’s fellow hackers, “Prime Suspect” and “Trax,” were arrested after Trax called police to report a death threat and confessed to hacking. Their arrests did not directly lead to Assange’s, though.

• Julian Assange was an Australian hacker and activist in the 1990s. In 1991, at age 18, he was charged for hacking into systems of Nortel, a Canadian telecommunications company. He pleaded guilty but avoided jail time, receiving only a small fine.

• The legal case and threat of imprisonment caused Assange to suffer from depression for several years. He had trouble holding down jobs and making long-term plans. He volunteered with nonprofits, worked as a systems administrator, and became involved with advocacy for free speech and criticism of Scientology.

• Assange joined the Cypherpunks Mailing List in 1995, using the nickname “Proff.” The list discussed ways to achieve anonymity and resist censorship online. Around this time, a Finnish activist named Johan Helsingius created an anonymous remailer service called Penet, which allowed people to send anonymous emails and posts. Penet became very popular, handling hundreds of thousands of messages.

• In 1995, Scientology lawyers demanded that Helsingius block anonymous messages critical of Scientology on Penet. When he refused, they reported him to the police, claiming copyrighted Scientology materials had been stolen. Helsingius fought the legal battle for over a year, but ultimately lost because Finnish law at the time did not adequately protect online anonymity and privacy.

• Assange and others on the Cypherpunks list followed Helsingius’s legal case closely. It demonstrated the threats to free speech and anonymity on the early Internet, which shaped Assange’s later work with WikiLeaks.

So in summary, this passage describes Assange’s early life as a hacker and activist, his struggles with depression and the law, his involvement with the Cypherpunks movement, and a key event - the legal battle over Penet - that highlighted the need for the kind of radical transparency that Assange would eventually pursue with WikiLeaks.

• Julf Helsingius ran Penet, an anonymous remailer service, in the early 1990s. The Church of Scientology pressured him into revealing the identity of a user, causing him to shut the service down. This showed the dangers of anonymity and influenced Assange and others.

• Jim Bell proposed an idea called “Assassination Politics” on the Cypherpunk Mailing List in 1997. It would allow anonymous bets on when people would die, with the implication that assassins would try to collect the money by killing the targets. Bell believed this could curb government overreach and lead to “crypto-anarchy.”

• Early anonymous remailers evolved into more sophisticated Mix Networks that bundled and delayed messages to hide their origins and destinations. Hal Finney and Lance Cottrell created remailers that integrated encryption. Cottrell’s Mixmaster program addressed weaknesses that could allow messages to be traced.

• DigiCash created anonymous digital cash that could be transferred untraceably. Though the company failed, its technology showed that anonymous transactions were possible.

• Tim May and Jim Bell were libertarian proponents of crypto-anarchy who believed anonymity tools could enable radical change. Bell proposed Assassination Politics to leverage anonymity and crypto-currency to fund assassinations of political figures, which he believed would limit government power.

• Bell envisioned Assassination Politics leading to a utopian crypto-anarchy with no militaries or authoritarian dictators. Critics argued it could enable chaos and empower violent extremists. The proposal was controversial and prompted debates on limits of anonymity.

The key events are the creation of anonymous communications and transactions technologies, proposals like Assassination Politics that envisioned radical change from these tools, debates over their implications, and early experiences showing their potential dangers. The summary touches on the role of key figures like Julf Helsingius, David Chaum, Tim May, and Jim Bell as well as systems like Penet, Mixmaster, and DigiCash’s anonymous currency.

• Jim Bell proposed “Assassination Politics,” an idea for using encryption and anonymous markets to crowd-fund political assassinations. The proposal outraged most cypherpunks and was seen as immoral and extreme.

• John Young posted Bell’s essay and documents related to his legal troubles to Cryptome.org. Young saw Bell as a victim of the Crypto Wars and provided close coverage of his trials and imprisonment. Young even nominated Bell for an award for “Assassination Politics.”

• Julian Assange occasionally commented on controversial cypherpunk ideas like Bell’s and TEMPEST, but mostly focused on developing encryption tools and systems. He saw that human vulnerabilities and trust in systems were as important as the math.

• Bell was imprisoned multiple times for tax evasion, stalking federal agents, and other offenses. His time in prison further radicalized him against the government. Some cypherpunks saw him as a martyr, but most rejected his extreme and violent stance.

• Tim May criticized Bell’s methods and discretion but shared some of his radical anti-government sentiments. May predicted “liquidation markets” and other dangerous anonymous systems but avoided direct association with Bell’s ideas.

• Phil Zimmermann was disgusted by Bell’s essay and wondered if he should not have developed PGP. He saw Bell as full of anger and violence.

• John Young and his wife discovered and became enthralled with the cypherpunk movement in the 1990s. Young served as an exhaustive aggregator and documenter of news related to cryptography, posting daily updates and summaries to the mailing list.

The key figures are Jim Bell, John Young, Julian Assange, Tim May, and Phil Zimmermann. The summary covers Bell’s controversial proposal, the varied reactions to it within the cypherpunk community, Bell’s legal troubles, and Young’s close involvement with documenting these events. It also touches on Assange’s minor participation and May and Zimmermann’s strong criticisms of Bell’s stance.

• Cryptographers knew that strong encryption is not enough to protect users from physical harm and coercion. They termed the method of extracting keys through force as “Rubber Hose Cryptanalysis.”

• In response, Julian Assange created a program called Rubberhose in 1997. It allowed activists to hide encrypted data in a way that made it appear they had given up all access to their secret information, even under torture. However, Rubberhose could motivate users to sacrifice themselves rather than give up comrades’ information.

• Assange believed authoritarian regimes depended on technology and communication to survive. He theorized that leaks could cut these “data-lines” and induce paranoia that would hamper their functioning. Leaks serve to empower enemies with facts and stop internal communication within regimes.

• John Young received many leaks on his Cryptome website, publishing information on intelligence agencies like MI6, MI5, the NSA, and the CIA. His leaks revealed incompetence, exposed surveillance programs, and outed many agents. Young’s work showed how leaks could damage secretive organizations.

• Assange quoted Oscar Wilde saying “Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask and he’ll tell you the truth.” This suggests Assange saw anonymity and secrecy as means to revealing truth.

• In summary, both Assange and Young saw leaks as a way to fight authoritarian power structures by exploiting their dependence on internal communications. Their work laid the groundwork for organizations like WikiLeaks.

• Jim Bell, the creator of “Assassination Politics,” was released from prison in March 2012 after serving time for parole violation.

• While in prison, Bell claimed to have made a “phenomenal discovery” in science that would make him enormously wealthy. He said he planned to donate $100,000 to $1 million to WikiLeaks. He also continued to support his “Assassination Politics” idea.

• Bell criticized the journalist for not helping expose government fraud that Bell claimed to have uncovered. Bell said if no one else implemented his “Assassination Politics” idea, he would do it himself by starting a new division in his corporations. He compared the number of potential assassinations under his system to the number of deaths during the French Revolution.

• Jacob Appelbaum showed off a rugged piece of hardware he had been working on to a group of hackers at an event called the Tor Hackfest at MIT. Tor is an anonymity program used by many people around the world.

• The summary touches on Jim Bell’s questionable claims about becoming wealthy and implementing his “Assassination Politics” idea, as well as Jacob Appelbaum revealing a hardware project to a group of hackers. The key details from the various stories and events are pulled together cohesively in the summary.

• Jacob Appelbaum, a programmer for Tor, kicked off a conference explaining a satellite modem project to help dissidents in the Middle East access Tor. The project aims to hide users’ locations from satellite providers even when using Tor.

• Appelbaum is known for his extreme privacy measures and works as a “freelance Internet freedom fighter.” He recently probed Libya’s digital infrastructure during protests and encouraged hackers to find Hosni Mubarak’s phone number during Egypt’s revolution.

• Appelbaum is associated with WikiLeaks and is close with Julian Assange. The U.S. government obtained Appelbaum’s data from Twitter, likely as part of an investigation into WikiLeaks. Appelbaum jokes that a State Department official “probably wants to shoot [him] in the head.”

• Ironically, the U.S. government, through DARPA, created the Internet and helped fund Tor. Even after Tor was allegedly used to leak secret documents, the government still supports it because agents sometimes need anonymity.

• Tor offers anonymity by hiding users’ identities but not necessarily their activities. It prevents others from knowing who is communicating, not necessarily what is being said.

• The State Department funds Tor to help political dissidents access the Web freely, while the military uses it for open-source intelligence gathering.

• Tor is an anonymity network that allows users to hide their location and access websites anonymously. It was created to provide anonymity for intelligence agencies but is now also used by corporations, criminals, and activists.

• Tor works by encrypting users’ data and routing it through a series of relays to hide its origin. No single relay knows both the user’s identity and what information they are accessing. This is known as “onion routing” because of the layers of encryption.

• Tor faces the challenge that location reveals identity. It aims to provide anonymity by obscuring users’ locations and the locations of websites. However, Tor is not perfectly secure and has some vulnerabilities that allow users to potentially be identified.

• The strength and weakness of Tor is that anyone can run a relay. This allows Tor to have many relays to provide strong anonymity. However, it also means that intelligence agencies could potentially run many relays to compromise users’ anonymity. There is no public evidence that any agency has successfully deanonymized Tor on a large scale.

• Tor was created by researchers at the Naval Research Laboratory, including Paul Syverson, in the mid-1990s. Syverson was interested in epistemic logic, which deals with knowledge and reasoning. The researchers wanted to create an anonymity network for the web but faced the challenge of providing low-latency anonymity. They proposed building a very large network with many relays to make traffic analysis difficult.

• In summary, Tor aims to provide anonymous access in an untrustworthy network by using “onion routing” and a distributed network of relays. It was created to serve the needs of government agencies but has become a tool used by both ethical and unethical actors for various purposes.

• Tor was created by researchers at the Naval Research Lab to provide anonymity for intelligence operations. However, for it to work effectively, it had to be distributed to a wide range of users, even those who might use it against the government.

• Paul Syverson came up with the idea of “onion routing” to provide anonymity. It involved encrypting data multiple times and sending it through multiple relay nodes so no one node could trace the origin. However, the encryption had to be fast enough for web traffic, so Syverson proposed using faster symmetric key encryption for most of the relaying and only slower public key encryption to establish the relay paths.

• Syverson recruited Roger Dingledine and Nick Mathewson, two privacy-focused hackers, to help build Tor. They had been friends at MIT, sharing an interest in cryptography, digital rights, and antiauthoritarian “Sport Death” culture. With funding from DARPA, they rebuilt Tor from scratch, turning Syverson’s idea into reality.

• The key insight was that for anonymity to work, Tor had to be open to all. A network used only by certain groups could be easily monitored. By opening it up to anyone and building a large, diverse network of relay nodes, Tor made surveillance extremely difficult. But this openness also meant Tor could be used for both good and bad purposes. Its creators accepted this trade-off as necessary for true anonymity.

• In summary, Tor shows how concepts of anonymity and privacy rooted in antiauthoritarian cypherpunk culture spread into the mainstream through open-source technology built by hackers. But providing strong anonymity at web scale required building a tool that could be used by all, for good and bad alike. This tension highlights some of the moral complexities in the spread of powerful cryptographic technologies.

• Tor was originally created by researchers Roger Dingledine and Nick Mathewson as an academic project to enable anonymous communication. However, it was difficult for non-technical users to access.

• In 2006, the Electronic Frontier Foundation provided funding to create easy-to-use versions of Tor for Windows, Mac, and Linux. This led to much wider adoption of Tor, especially in countries that censor the internet like Iran and China.

• The U.S. government then provided funding to further improve Tor and make it more user-friendly. This resulted in many more users adopting Tor, with over 36 million new users in 2010 alone.

• However, Tor’s popularity also led to governments trying to block it. China blocks most Tor nodes and relays. Tor is working on ways to avoid censorship, including developing a Tor Wi-Fi router and sending developers around the world to set up more nodes and bridges.

• One of Tor’s main developers and evangelists is Jacob Appelbaum. He is an outspoken activist and whistleblower advocate. He works with WikiLeaks and Julian Assange and is frequently harassed by U.S. border officials. However, he refuses to reveal details about his relationship with WikiLeaks.

• Appelbaum had a very difficult childhood, spending much of his early years in foster care and children’s homes. His parents were largely absent. He idolizes his father, who was a heroin addict and burglar. Appelbaum learned how to pick locks and crack safes from his father at a young age.

• In summary, Tor has become an important tool for circumventing censorship and enabling anonymous communication, despite facing significant opposition. Jacob Appelbaum, one of Tor’s most prominent developers, had a troubled childhood but sees Tor as a way to give power and freedom to marginalized groups.

• Jacob Appelbaum had a traumatic childhood. His family was homeless for periods of time, and his father rented out most of their home to pay for his heroin addiction. Appelbaum lived in half a kitchen and witnessed dangerous situations like overdoses.

• Despite this, Appelbaum does not blame his father, who was injured in a car accident as a child and lived with chronic pain. Appelbaum himself was hit by a car as a teen and has back issues. He says they were not so different, but he chose computers over heroin.

• Appelbaum’s first computer was likely stolen. He learned about tech from friends and neighbors. He was interested in cryptography and how it could shift power from authorities to those who understand math and security. The digital world offered an escape from his difficult home life.

• Appelbaum dropped out of college at 20 to care for his ill father. He took jobs refurbishing computers and volunteering for activist groups. In 2002, he got a job as an IT admin for Greenpeace. He learned the importance of security from a mentor there and began traveling to participate in direct actions.

• Appelbaum’s father died in 2004. Appelbaum blames the junkies who lived with him, saying they withheld drugs and injected his legs with water instead. He says the police did not investigate because “no one cares about junkies.” This solidified Appelbaum’s hatred of authority.

• After his father’s death, Appelbaum wanted to escape the U.S. and stop “contributing to a world of bullshit evil.” He decided to smuggle himself into Iraq to visit a friend, saying he would either come back whole or full of holes.

• Before starting WikiLeaks in 2005, Julian Assange was obsessed with certain ideas like the Bourbaki, a group of French mathematicians who published anonymously under a single name. He was also interested in onion routing, a way to anonymously send information over the internet.

• Assange quit school in 2005 to focus on WikiLeaks. He worked long hours out of a house that served as a proto-headquarters, covering the walls in plans and code. Volunteers would stay there rent-free in exchange for work.

• WikiLeaks used encryption and other methods to keep sources anonymous. It kept no IP logs and used script to generate fake submissions to obfuscate real leakers. Tor allowed WikiLeaks to protect sensitive sources and itself.

Tor Hidden Service allowed WikiLeaks to hide the location of its web server and protect the anonymity of sources who submitted documents through the service. Sources could submit documents physically through anonymous mail drops or digitally through Tor. Tor protected sources’ anonymity but did not encrypt the actual documents. WikiLeaks volunteers were able to access unencrypted data that passed through the Tor network. WikiLeaks claimed to have accessed huge amounts of data from hacking Chinese spies and other sources.

Jacob Appelbaum visited Iraq in 2006. He found that Kurds supported the U.S. invasion but heard stories of U.S. soldiers killing civilians at checkpoints. He felt ashamed of the U.S.’s role. His group’s vehicle broke down near an oil refinery that then exploded, reminding him of the danger. He left Iraq, feeling disturbed by what he witnessed.

Appelbaum then worked as a security researcher in San Francisco. When Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, he flew to Texas to interview victims in the Astrodome. He found prison-like conditions and stories of violence and neglect. He saw parallels between the disaster response in Iraq and after Katrina. Appelbaum seemed to be motivated by a desire to expose injustice and human rights abuses.

The summary covers the key details around WikiLeaks accessing unencrypted data from Tor, Appelbaum’s experiences witnessing the effects of the Iraq War and Hurricane Katrina, and his motivations in exposing human rights issues.

• In 2005, Jacob Appelbaum, a hacker and activist, gave a talk at the Chaos Communication Congress in Berlin criticizing Julian Assange’s Rubberhose encryption system. Appelbaum argued that the system could encourage endless torture. He proposed an alternative called Mutually Assured Information Destruction (MAID) where encrypted data is automatically deleted if the user does not log in after a certain time period.

• Despite their initial disagreement, Appelbaum and Assange became friends. Appelbaum says he woke up on New Year’s Day 2010 in bed with Assange and two women after a night of programming, though he later clarified they slept in separate beds.

• WikiLeaks started in 2006 and initially published a mix of leaked documents, some of questionable provenance and reliability. The site gained prominence in 2007 after publishing the Kroll Report, a leaked report on corruption in Kenya, and documents on extrajudicial killings in Kenya. WikiLeaks went on to publish documents on tax shelters, toxic dumping, the Icelandic financial crisis, and 9/11.

• In 2008, WikiLeaks published a leaked Scientology manual, gratifying Assange who had long opposed the church’s intimidation of leakers. The leak led to further leaks and media scrutiny of Scientology.

• Assange traveled to Kenya in 2007, linking up with transparency activists there. He sought to create an “advisory board for Africa” and worked with Mwalimu Mati, an organizer from Transparency International. Mati gave WikiLeaks the Kroll Report and other Kenya leaks.

• The summary covers WikiLeaks’ early history from 2006 to 2009, touching on its initial anarchic philosophy, key partnerships, leaks, growth in prominence, and campaign against the Church of Scientology. The key events are the Kenya leaks in 2007, followed by other prominent leaks in 2008, leading to WikiLeaks’ rise to prominence.

• Julian Assange was scheduled to give a keynote speech at a hacker conference but did not show up. Instead, a young American named Jacob Appelbaum, who worked with WikiLeaks and Tor, gave the speech.

• Appelbaum criticized the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and supporters of WikiLeaks like Bradley Manning. He argued that simply “speaking truth to power” is not enough. You have to actually give power to the people.

• Appelbaum announced that WikiLeaks’ submissions system was back up and running. He directly appealed to the audience of hackers to become leakers and send documents to WikiLeaks.

• Many in the audience responded enthusiastically to Appelbaum’s appeal. As his talk ended, a decoy wearing a black hoodie came on stage while the actual Appelbaum slipped out to board a flight to Berlin. Meanwhile, the Collateral Murder video was shown, representing the birth of a new leaking movement.

• The article then shifts to discussing Peiter Zatko, a Department of Defense employee known as “Mudge” in the hacker community. Mudge was once a famous hacker himself but now leads a cybersecurity research team at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), a secretive government agency that develops advanced technologies for the military.

• Mudge’s new project at DARPA aims to eliminate digital leaks altogether. The article suggests this project could be as groundbreaking as other DARPA projects like the Internet, GPS, stealth planes, and self-driving cars.

• Peiter Zatko, also known as “Mudge,” leads a DARPA program called CINDER that aims to identify and stop insider threats, like malicious software or human leakers, within systems.

• CINDER was created in response to a penetration test Mudge conducted showing how vulnerable systems are to data exfiltration. The program funds projects to develop new ways to address this problem.

• Despite his background as a hacker, Mudge fits in at DARPA, which funds seemingly impossible and futuristic projects. Both DARPA and Mudge have experience with secrecy and transparency. Mudge actually knew Julian Assange years ago.

• In 2010, WikiLeaks released the Collateral Murder video, showing a US attack in Iraq that killed civilians. This was followed by leaks of 76,000 Afghanistan War documents, 392,000 Iraq War documents, and 251,000 US State Department cables. These leaks revealed government knowledge of torture, civilian deaths, corruption, spying, and more.

• The leaks embarrassed governments and companies, leading to retaliation against WikiLeaks. Companies cut off support and donations. The US government condemned the leaks. Assange was charged with sex crimes in Sweden. Although confined to house arrest in the UK, fighting extradition, Assange continued his work with WikiLeaks.

• Despite the threats, Assange and WikiLeaks had achieved a major victory for transparency and embarrassed powerful institutions around the world.

• Julian Assange and WikiLeaks threatened to leak thousands of documents from a major U.S. bank in early 2011. Though Assange did not name the bank, signs pointed to Bank of America.

• Assange claimed the leak would expose the bank’s “ecosystem of corruption” at the executive level. However, the leak never materialized, possibly due to distractions, lack of impact, or loss of documents.

• Regardless, the threat caused Bank of America to launch an extensive effort to prepare for and prevent the leak. They hired security firms and consultants, investigated for potential leaks, and took defensive measures.

• One of the security firms they hired was HBGary Federal, a small start-up that aimed to defeat online anonymity. HBGary Federal’s CEO, Aaron Barr, was eager to get the job to prove his company’s worth and gain more work.

• HBGary Federal worked with two other security firms to analyze WikiLeaks and suggest strategies against them, including cyber attacks, disinformation campaigns, fake leaks, and social media monitoring. They presented these recommendations to Bank of America.

• Though simplistic and inaccurate at times, Barr’s presentation and recommendations highlighted WikiLeaks’ infrastructure, supporters, and methods. The security firms suggested aggressive tactics to undermine WikiLeaks.

• In summary, WikiLeaks’ threat against Bank of America spurred the bank to hire security firms to help neutralize the threat. These firms, especially HBGary Federal, saw an opportunity to promote their capabilities, though their analysis and recommendations were flawed. Their suggestions involved ethically questionable measures to attack WikiLeaks.

• Aaron Barr, CEO of the security firm HBGary Federal, wanted to prove that his company had strong digital intelligence skills in order to win new business.
• Barr decided to target Anonymous, a loose hacktivist group, as a case study. He believed that despite their anonymity tools, he could chart Anonymous’s social connections and organizational structure.
• Barr planned to reveal his findings at an upcoming security conference. But to gain more publicity, he decided to focus specifically on Anonymous.
• Anonymous emerged around 2008 to protest the Church of Scientology’s censorship of a Tom Cruise video. They launched cyberattacks and protests against Scientology.
• Anonymous later allied with WikiLeaks, attacking companies like PayPal, Visa and Mastercard for blocking WikiLeaks donations. They also harassed officials involved with Bradley Manning’s detention.
• Although Anonymous members hid their identities, Barr thought he could infiltrate their online groups and networks to map connections between members. He believed this could demonstrate his firm’s digital intelligence skills to potential clients.

The key details are:

• Aaron Barr and his security firm HBGary Federal wanted to prove their cyber capabilities in order to win new business.

• Barr targeted Anonymous, believing that despite their anonymity tools, he could uncover their organizational structure through social network mapping.

• Anonymous started as a protest group against Scientology but later allied with WikiLeaks, attacking companies that cutoff WikiLeaks funding and military officials involved with Bradley Manning.

• Barr hoped that infiltrating Anonymous’s online networks would highlight his firm’s digital intelligence skills and gain major publicity.

• In early 2011, the author contacted companies that submitted proposals for DARPA’s program to develop technologies to detect leaks. Most companies declined to share details or used vague language to describe their approaches. One company pointed out the challenges of detecting old-school physical leaks.

• An expert said the only real solution is to lock down all information, but that goes against organizational effectiveness. The cybersecurity industry previously tried data leak prevention software but it didn’t work well due to the volume of information sharing.

• After 9/11, the government focused more on facilitating information sharing to prevent terrorism than on preventing leaks. Proposed laws aimed to prevent overreaction and facilitate continued information sharing. This makes data leak prevention difficult.

• The industry now focuses more on network forensics - constantly monitoring networks to trace leakers after the fact. But technology can’t yet fully automate the analysis required. DARPA’s program aims to build a “leak-sniffing robo-Columbo.”

• The program director, Peiter Zatko, aims to identify “malicious missions” to steal data. His system would monitor for suspicious network activity in real time. But minimizing false positives is challenging, like “trying to come up with a medical test for some kind of super-AIDS.”

• The system looks for a “probabilistic chain” of events that signal a purposeful leak, including reconnaissance, analyzing files, gathering and preparing data, and exfiltrating it. Even after a leak, the “tells” may continue, like Robert Hanssen repeatedly searching a database to check if he was caught.

• In January 2011, Aaron Barr, CEO of cybersecurity firm HBGary Federal, attempted to deanonymize members of the hacktivist group Anonymous.

• Barr and a developer at his firm, Mark Trynor, created a tool to scrape social media data and uncover the real identities of Anonymous members who used pseudonyms. They first used the tool to analyze FARC members, then turned to Anonymous.

• Trynor objected to Barr’s methods on moral grounds, arguing they eroded civil liberties. But Barr insisted this was about security and power. Barr created a fake persona to infiltrate Anonymous and identified three alleged leaders.

• Trynor and others at HBGary questioned Barr’s analysis and conclusions, arguing his data was too limited to draw firm conclusions. But Barr briefed the FBI, media, and contractors about his findings.

• The Financial Times published a story about Barr’s research. Barr and HBGary expected more government work to follow. But Trynor and others warned Barr’s arrogance and flawed analysis could backfire.

• The story contrasts Barr’s fate with that of Peiter Zatko, a famous hacker known as “Mudge,” who began hacking in the 1970s before laws and norms around cybersecurity took shape. Zatko discovered and explored early networks as a child, driven by curiosity. In contrast, Barr took an adversarial approach that provoked retaliation.

• The story suggests Barr represents a new, legally questionable cybersecurity mindset that emerged post-9/11. Zatko’s generation of hackers explored technology with more carefree curiosity before the rise of modern cyber threats and cyber warfare.

• As a teenager in the 1980s, Mudge (real name Peiter Zatko) was fascinated by hacking and gaining access to computer networks. He idolized counterculture figures like Frank Zappa and Abbie Hoffman.

• Mudge studied music at Berklee College of Music, but continued to attend hacker meetups. In the early 1990s, he joined a group called the L0pht, an elite hacker collective based in a warehouse space in Boston.

• The L0pht focused on finding and exposing vulnerabilities in systems and software. They adhered to a “gray hat” ethical code, hacking systems and publishing their findings publicly to raise awareness, rather than for illegal means. They saw themselves as a check on irresponsible tech companies.

• Under Mudge’s leadership, the L0pht began courting media attention to publicize their findings. They criticized companies like Microsoft for claiming their products were secure when the L0pht could easily hack them.

• For example, in the late 1990s Mudge and the L0pht exposed major flaws in Windows NT’s password encryption and Internet Explorer’s security. They built a tool called L0phtCrack that could quickly crack NT’s password encryption.

• Through their public hacking, the L0pht forced companies like Microsoft to take security issues seriously and make improvements to their products. But their provocative, confrontational style also made them controversial figures.

• Mudge emerges as the driving force behind the L0pht’s media strategies and public exhibitions of hacking major companies’ security flaws. Under his leadership, the group moved from an underground hacker collective to a more public “gray hat” organization intent on forcing companies and users to grapple with cybersecurity issues.

• Aaron Barr grew up in a small logging town in Washington state. He joined the Navy after high school, intrigued by the promise of code-breaking and secret work.

• Barr worked as a signals intelligence analyst for the Navy, intercepting and decrypting communications. He spent time analyzing signals on aircraft carriers and even volunteered to support Marines in Kosovo, where he helped track down pockets of violence after the NATO bombing campaign.

• Barr left the military in 2001 and took a job as a systems administrator. He later got a master’s in cybersecurity and did “war driving” - driving around scanning for network vulnerabilities.

• Barr and a classmate, Ted Vera, were hired by Northrop Grumman as “cyber warriors.” This was around the time the defense industry was experiencing major cyberespionage, like the Titan Rain attack that stole data from Sandia National Labs and Lockheed Martin.

• At Northrop Grumman, Barr taught DoD officials about social media vulnerabilities and how profiles could be used to research targets. He had the idea that the same techniques could be used against cyber-spies to glean information about them. “It hit me: We could apply social media analysis to link together all the malware and proxies and see who was behind them,” Barr says.

• Barr believed cyber-spies were sloppy and left clues in their malware that, with the right analytical techniques, could point back to them as individuals. He thought he could “de-cloak” hackers this way. This belief would later get him into trouble with Anonymous.

• In 2006, Barr left Northrop Grumman to launch HBGary Federal with two former colleagues, focusing on cyber-threat intelligence for government agencies and defense contractors.

• Aaron Barr, a former hacker, develops cybersecurity solutions for Northrop Grumman that aim to attribute attacks to individuals.

• In 1998, Richard Clarke, a top White House official, meets with hackers called “The L0pht” to learn about cyber threats. They demonstrate vulnerabilities in critical infrastructure and technology like the Palm Pilot.

• Clarke invites The L0pht to testify before Congress about cyber risks. Their testimony alarms lawmakers and raises their profile.

• A company called @stake acquires The L0pht as their research division. However, the group starts to fracture as Mudge, their leader, frequently works with the government.

• After the dot-com crash, @stake lays off most of The L0pht. Mudge leaves altogether to work on cyber policy. The remainders believe the group’s collaborative spirit was lost.

• Mudge reemerges with a focus on “insider threats” - malicious actors already within a company. He helps found a startup called Intrusic to address this, but it folds after three years due to management issues and the difficulty of the problem.

• Analysts argue Intrusic failed because it lacked experienced leadership and produced tools that worked for hackers but not businesses. More fundamentally, it was hard to sell technology to detect insider threats when companies didn’t want to believe they had a problem.

• In summary, former hacker Aaron Barr develops early cyber attribution tools before shifting to the government. Separately, the hacker think tank L0pht gains prominence demonstrating cyber risks but ultimately fragments. Their leader Mudge tries and fails to spin out a company based on “insider threat” detection, highlighting the challenges of the problem.

• Aaron Barr, the CEO of the security firm HBGary Federal, investigated Anonymous and claimed to have uncovered the identities of some of its members.

• In retaliation, Anonymous hacked into HBGary Federal’s systems. They exploited a flaw in the company’s website to access their password database and Barr’s emails.

• Barr had used the same simple password for multiple accounts, so once Anonymous had it they gained access to his Twitter, the company website, and over 70,000 company emails.

• Anonymous defaced the HBGary Federal website and Barr’s Twitter, posted his personal details online, and deleted terabytes of the company’s data. They also accessed Greg Hoglund’s (the CEO of HBGary, HBGary Federal’s parent company) website.

• Anonymous posted the stolen emails on their own website, AnonLeaks, to embarrass Barr. The emails revealed potentially illegal plans by HBGary Federal to monitor and attack enemies of the US Chamber of Commerce.

• The scandal led HBGary Federal’s partners to cut ties with the company. Barr resigned, and HBGary Federal lost most of its employees and customers. A year later, HBGary itself was bought out.

• Anonymous reacted unsympathetically to Barr’s resignation, saying they had “destroyed him in anonymous style”. But some members argued they should move on to their next operation.

So in summary, Anonymous thoroughly humiliated and nearly destroyed HBGary Federal in retaliation for Barr’s attempt to unmask their members. The hack exposed potentially illegal cybersecurity practices and caused major reputational damage.

• In 2011, after Barr exposed Anonymous members, several hackers associated with Anonymous were arrested. Some had used anonymity services to hide their identities but the services gave data to law enforcement. The arrested hackers included teenagers and a 24-year-old man posing as a teen girl.

• The FBI later charged Sabu, a 28-year-old hacker who had entered an Anonymous chat without masking his IP address. Facing over 100 years in prison, Sabu became an FBI informant and helped identify other Anonymous members.

• That same year, Peiter Zatko, a former hacker known as Mudge, gave a keynote at the Black Hat hacker conference in his role as a DARPA program manager. He mentioned a DARPA program called CINDER but said it had “nothing to do with humans.” However, the program’s details suggested it focused on identifying potential whistleblowers and leakers.

• Around the same time, Aaron Barr, the former HBGary Federal CEO, met with the author. Barr still opposed Anonymous and said that while some anonymity is good for whistleblowers in repressive regimes, attributable speech is best in democracies. He proposed a “Paranoia Meter” for CINDER that would secretly monitor users for signs of suspicious behavior to detect leakers. However, DARPA rejected Barr’s proposal.

• DARPA no longer reveals which contractors receive funding for CINDER, so it’s unclear if any version of the Paranoia Meter was ultimately funded.

• Thomas Drake was an NSA whistleblower who exposed the agency’s wasteful spending on a failed data-mining program called Trailblazer.

• Drake began working at the NSA on September 11, 2001. He became aware of an effective data-mining program called Thinthread that could have potentially detected the 9/11 hijackers. However, the NSA rejected Thinthread and pursued the much more expensive Trailblazer program instead.

• Drake anonymously leaked information about Trailblazer’s failures to a Baltimore Sun reporter. Although his leaks were unrelated to the NSA’s warrantless wiretapping program, Drake was still eventually prosecuted under the Espionage Act.

• The prosecution exaggerated the charges against Drake, claiming he took highly classified documents. But just before trial, they admitted the documents were less sensitive. Drake pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor and received probation.

• Drake’s prosecution was part of a broader Obama administration crackdown on leakers and whistleblowers. Drake’s case shows how whistleblowers who follow proper channels and try to expose government waste and abuse can still face severe legal retaliation.

• In total, Drake lost his job, spent over $80,000 in legal fees, took a hit to his reputation, and suffered damage to his relationships. Although he avoided jail time, the experience left him disillusioned with the system. He now works at an Apple store making an hourly wage.

The key points are:

1. Thomas Drake was an NSA whistleblower who tried to expose the Trailblazer boondoggle.

2. Despite following proper channels, Drake faced unjust prosecution and severe personal and financial consequences.

3. Drake’s case illustrates how the government harshly retaliates against whistleblowers, even when they reveal legitimate wrongdoing.

• Birgitta Jónsdóttir is an Icelandic politician who partnered with WikiLeaks to create the Icelandic Modern Media Initiative (IMMI). IMMI aims to make Iceland a legal haven for whistleblowers and leakers.

• Jónsdóttir sees IMMI as enabling a decentralized global media movement. She wants WikiLeaks to inspire many other organizations like it. IMMI would allow leakers and whistleblowers to operate legally from Iceland.

• Daniel Domscheit-Berg, formerly a spokesperson for WikiLeaks, left the organization in 2010. He complained about WikiLeaks’ dysfunction, lack of transparency, and America-centrism. He said “there must be a thousand WikiLeaks.”

• In the following year, many WikiLeaks copycats sprung up. But despite the hype, few actually published leaks. WikiLeaks’ own submission system had gone down, limiting its ability to accept new leaks.

• Jónsdóttir’s vision is for Iceland to be a “Scandinavian Galt’s Gulch” - a refuge for “secret-spillers” and truth-tellers. She sees IMMI and WikiLeaks as the “tip” of a movement to increase government transparency.

The key ideas are that Jónsdóttir and Domscheit-Berg envisioned a broad movement for transparency and enabling whistleblowing on a global scale. Despite initial hype, most of the new leak organizations failed to actually publish leaks. But Jónsdóttir continues to push for Iceland as a legal haven for “secret-spillers.”

• After WikiLeaks went offline in 2010, many new leak sites emerged to take its place, but none were very successful in obtaining or publishing leaked documents.
• Most of the new leak sites did not adequately protect anonymity and lacked strong encryption and security measures like WikiLeaks had. They were vulnerable to attacks that could reveal leakers’ identities.
• Two exceptions were BalkanLeaks, launched by Bulgarian journalists in 2010, and its parent organization Bivol. BalkanLeaks was the only new leaking site that actually obtained and published significant leaks.
• BalkanLeaks co-founder Atanas Tchobanov attributes their success to strictly requiring anonymity through the Tor network and building trust in the site. The site’s founders, Tchobanov and Assen Yordanov, were respected independent journalists in Bulgaria, where most media is controlled by the government.
• Leaking and investigative journalism are especially dangerous in Bulgaria, where reporters face intimidation, violence, and even murder for exposing corruption and organized crime. Tchobanov says most Bulgarian journalists are “either scared or bought.”
• Some of BalkanLeaks’ most significant leaks exposed government corruption, illegal wiretapping, and the participation of high-level prosecutors and judges in mafia activities and Freemasonry. The leaks revealed the inner workings of corruption in the Bulgarian judiciary.

The key factors in BalkanLeaks’ success were:

1. A strict commitment to anonymity and security for leakers
2. The reputations and independence of its founders
3. The appetite in Bulgaria for exposing government and judicial corruption
4. The courage to publish leaks despite threats of violence and intimidation against journalists

BalkanLeaks became a lone success in the wave of new leak sites that emerged after WikiLeaks went dark, fueled by these crucial ingredients.

• Georgi Markov, a Bulgarian dissident, was assassinated in London in 1978 by an assassin using a poisoned umbrella tip.

• Yordan Yordanov and Atanas Tchobanov run the whistleblowing website BalkanLeaks, which exposes government and mafia corruption in Bulgaria. They live in exile to avoid threats and intimidation.

• Clay Shirky, a New York University professor, compares BalkanLeaks to the post-World War II UKUSA intelligence sharing agreement between English-speaking allies. Just as governments spied on each other’s citizens then, citizens are now spying on governments through leaks and whistleblowing.

• Shirky predicts there will be attempts to suppress cross-border leaks and whistleblowing. He thinks these attempts will ultimately fail.

• WikiLeak’s servers were once housed in an underground nuclear bunker in Stockholm at the Bahnhof data center. The bunker was built to withstand a nuclear blast, but its main appeal to WikiLeaks was Sweden’s strong laws protecting journalists’ sources and free speech.

• PRQ, another Stockholm company, has hosted WikiLeaks and The Pirate Bay. PRQ pledges never to take down any of its controversial clients’ websites. Its founders, Gottfrid Svartholm and Fredrik Neij, started The Pirate Bay as teenagers to share pirated media. They are known for insulting and taunting those who threaten legal action against them.

• After the Pirate Bay’s servers were raided in Sweden in 2007, the file-sharing site bounced between temporary hosts across Europe. It found a long-term home at PRQ, a hosting company that protects customers’ anonymity and resists cooperating with authorities.

• PRQ hosts many controversial sites, including a Chechen rebel media organization, an Italian blog banned by Google, and forums discussing pedophilia. PRQ’s CEO says “even though I loathe what they say, I defend them.” The company requires prepaid anonymous payments and keeps little information about customers.

• PRQ and similar Swedish hosts, along with Sweden’s laws protecting anonymity, enabled WikiLeaks. Another Icelandic hosting company, 1984 Web Hosting, has a similar philosophy of resisting “threats, intimidation, manipulation, pressure, or probes.”

• The founder of 1984 Web Hosting is working with Icelandic MP Birgitta Jónsdóttir to draft a proposal called the Icelandic Modern Media Initiative (IMMI) to adopt the strongest press freedom and transparency laws from around the world. They hope it will boost Iceland’s economy and reputation. The country also has abundant cheap renewable energy to power data centers.

• Two Bulgarian journalists, Assen Yordanov and Atanas Tchobanov, run a WikiLeaks-style site called BalkanLeaks. They use an image of a buffalo as their symbol because buffalos have perfect memories and a capacity for vengeance.

• Yordanov became a journalist after discovering that his wife of one year was an agent spying on him for the secret police. His family had long been enemies of Bulgaria’s Communist government, which may have assassinated his grandfather, a resistance general. Yordanov graduated university and began working as an audio engineer, where he met his wife. A friend soon revealed she was spying on him.

Jordan Yovanov was a Bulgarian investigative journalist. He discovered that his wife of six years had been secretly spying on him for the communist government. Feeling deeply betrayed, he divorced his wife and went to live isolated in the mountains for five years with his herd of animals.

Eventually, he returned to the city of Burgas to care for his grandmother. He got a job at a newspaper and began exposing government corruption and criminal activity. In 1994, he revealed that the Burgas airport was being used to smuggle oil, cigarettes, weapons and gold. He received death threats in response. The next year, he exposed an illegal cigarette factory operation. One of the men involved was Boyko Borisov, who is now the Prime Minister of Bulgaria.

Birgitta Jonsdottir is an Icelandic artist, poet, and activist. She grew up in a small fishing village where she was raised by her mother and stepfather, who was a fishing boat captain. Her stepfather taught her to live simply and honestly. Her mother was a folk singer who knew many artists and musicians. Jonsdottir was exposed to art, music, and unconventional ideas from an early age. She embraced punk culture and anarchism as a teenager. At 14, she refused to go on a school field trip and instead wrote a poem about nuclear holocaust.

On Christmas Eve, Jonsdottir’s stepfather disappeared. His car was found but his body was not. The police concluded he had drowned himself. Jonsdottir had to care for her emotionally collapsed mother after this. She went through a period of exile, reflection, and art following her stepfather’s death.

In summary, the stories describe the lives of a Bulgarian journalist and an Icelandic artist, including formative experiences with government betrayal and loss that shaped their unconventional paths.

• Birgitta Jónsdóttir is an Icelandic poet, painter, and activist. She published her first book of poetry at age 22 and married an Icelandic-American photographer soon after. They moved to the U.S. where she sold vacuums door-to-door while writing and painting. Her husband suffered from epilepsy and depression, and eventually committed suicide.

• After her husband’s death, Jónsdóttir threw herself into art and activism. She co-founded an avant-garde art collective that pushed the boundaries of the early Internet. She also organized protests against controversial government projects like a hydroelectric dam and Iceland’s involvement in the Iraq War.

• In 2008, Iceland’s banking system collapsed, triggering a severe financial crisis. Massive protests erupted, forcing the government to resign. Jónsdóttir joined a new political party called the Citizens’ Movement, which vowed to dissolve itself after 8 years to avoid corruption. Despite little media attention, the party won 7% of the vote and Jónsdóttir won a seat in Iceland’s parliament.

• Atanas Tchobanov is a Bulgarian hacktivist living in exile in Paris. He was fired from a government job in Bulgaria for refusing to join the Communist Party. After the fall of the Iron Curtain, he moved to Paris, earned a PhD, and worked as a computer scientist. He founded an NGO for Bulgarians abroad and edited a magazine highlighting problems in Bulgaria’s government.

• Tchobanov was particularly angered by a mandatory health care tax charged to all Bulgarians, even those living abroad. In protest, he launched a “text message terrorism” campaign, flooding government officials with angry SMS messages. His hacktivism eventually led him to participate in WikiLeaks’ release of documents exposing government corruption.

• Bulgaria instituted an annual tax on expatriates living abroad in 2007. A Bulgarian activist living in France, Ivan Tchobanov, led a campaign to protest the tax by flooding Bulgarian parliamentarians’ cell phones with text messages. The campaign successfully pressured parliament to repeal the tax law.

• Two Bulgarian investigative journalists, Assen Yordanov and Maria Nikolayeva, exposed corrupt land deals in Bulgaria in 2007. After their report was published, two men threatened Nikolayeva and warned her against further reporting. The journalists continued their reporting, and Yordanov had to personally distribute copies of their newspaper to prevent issues from being bought up and censored.

• John Perry Barlow, a former Grateful Dead lyricist and internet activist, gave a speech in Iceland in 2008 envisioning Iceland as a “Switzerland of Bits” - a transparency haven. Birgitta Jónsdóttir, an Icelandic politician, was in the audience and the idea stuck with her.

• Later in 2008, WikiLeaks published documents exposing suspicious loans made by Iceland’s Kaupthing Bank to connected parties. The leaks sparked government investigations and arrests. The publication brought WikiLeaks international fame and acclaim in Iceland.

• Julian Assange and Daniel Domscheit-Berg visited Iceland in 2008. On an Icelandic TV show, Assange promoted the idea of Iceland becoming a “Switzerland of Bits” and a transparency haven with the strongest freedom of information and media laws in the world.

• Julian Assange and Birgitta Jónsdóttir conceived of the idea for IMMI, Iceland’s proposed transparency haven, in 2009. They gathered a group of activists and researched laws from around the world to propose to Iceland’s parliament.

• The proposal was unanimously approved, but Assange became distracted by the video of a U.S. helicopter attack in Iraq that he showed Jónsdóttir. This video ultimately led to WikiLeaks’ publication of the Iraq and Afghanistan war logs.

• Atika Yordanov, a Bulgarian journalist, was attacked in 2007 for his reporting. He teamed up with journalist Assen Tcholbanov to launch Bivol, an independent news website. They uncovered corruption in the Bulgarian government.

• After another journalist was brutally attacked in Bulgaria, Tcholbanov realized Bivol needed better ways to protect itself. He found tools like PGP, Tor, and WikiLeaks.

• BalkanLeaks was created to publish leaks focused on the Balkans. They published documents like a nuclear power agreement and tapes exposing judicial bribery.

• BalkanLeaks wanted to publish more of the unpublished U.S. diplomatic cables held by WikiLeaks but were dependent on WikiLeaks to redact sensitive details. There was criticism of WikiLeaks’ publication of Afghanistan documents that endangered people mentioned in the leaks.

In summary, Assange conceived of transparency proposals with the IMMI project in Iceland but became distracted by the video that led to major WikiLeaks publications. Separately, Bulgarian journalists launched independent reporting projects and created BalkanLeaks to expose more localized corruption, though they relied on WikiLeaks and sought to publish more diplomatic cables. Their reporting led to backlash, highlighting some of the difficulties around publishing leaked documents.

• WikiLeaks began publishing the Cablegate documents in November 2010. However, the vast number of cables and the intensive redaction process meant that only a small portion of the cables were published initially.

• Bivol, a Bulgarian investigative journalism organization, wanted access to the unredacted cables related to Bulgaria. They were unable to get the cables from WikiLeaks’ media partners like The Guardian. However, they were able to obtain some unredacted cables from other sources.

• Bivol published a story about organized crime in Bulgaria based on one unredacted cable they obtained. WikiLeaks then decided to give Bivol access to more Bulgaria-related cables. Bivol’s founders, Atanas Tchobanov and Assen Yordanov, met with Julian Assange, who approved of their work and gave them access to Bulgaria’s embassy cables.

• Bivol found many scandals and corrupt activities detailed in the cables, including illegal activities by Bulgarian officials in the U.S., money laundering by Bulgarian banks, and the criminal connections of the Bulgarian prime minister Boyko Borisov. They prepared to publish this information.

• Meanwhile, Birgitta Jónsdóttir’s advocacy led Iceland to pass laws protecting journalists’ anonymity. However, Jónsdóttir then received a request from Twitter for her account information in response to a U.S. government investigation. She worked with lawyers to fight this request, and found that the government was also seeking information about WikiLeaks volunteer Jacob Appelbaum.

• Birgitta Jónsdóttir, Jacob Appelbaum, Rop Gonggrijp, and likely Julian Assange and Bradley Manning were targeted by the U.S. government for their ties to WikiLeaks. The government sought access to their online communications and personal data.

• While Twitter notified Jónsdóttir that her data was requested, four other companies quietly handed over her data without telling her. She, Appelbaum, and Gonggrijp fought the data requests in court for a year but ultimately lost.

• Jónsdóttir sees the targeting of her data as highlighting the broader issue of governments secretly obtaining people’s private information. She argues tech companies could move to Iceland to avoid U.S. laws or the U.S. could repeal laws like the Patriot Act.

• Evgeny Morozov believes publicizing government corruption may embarrass leaders but is unlikely to spur real political change, especially in places where corruption is openly known. He was skeptical in 2010 that WikiLeaks or BalkanLeaks would be effective.

• BalkanLeaks published cables alleging Bulgaria’s prime minister was a criminal, but he largely emerged unscathed. However, the leaks contributed to Bulgaria being denied access to the EU’s Schengen zone and the prosecution of former officials for bribery. The full impact remains to be seen.

• Atanas Tchobanov, the editor of BalkanLeaks, believes slow, incremental change can result from leaks. He gave the example of the Pentagon Papers leading to Watergate. He acknowledges leaks don’t always achieve their goals but said exposing illegal construction saved a beach in Bulgaria.

• The summary outlines how Jónsdóttir, BalkanLeaks, and others have fought to expose government overreach and wrongdoing, often in the face of skepticism about their effectiveness and personal costs. While victories can be slow, their work has led to some policy and legal changes as well as raised public awareness about privacy and corruption issues. But more systemic reforms remain elusive.

• The chapter describes a visit to the Chaos Communication Camp, a hacker conference held every four years in Germany. The author is there to report on Daniel Domscheit-Berg and his organization OpenLeaks.

• Domscheit-Berg was once Julian Assange’s right-hand man at WikiLeaks, but left the organization in 2010 amid personal and professional differences. OpenLeaks is Domscheit-Berg’s attempt to build a new leaking platform that avoids some of the issues that plagued WikiLeaks, like questionable data security and legal issues.

• OpenLeaks has been slow to launch, missing several promised release dates over nearly a year. Domscheit-Berg insists this is because they are being very thorough in building an “end-to-end” secure system. They plan to open up their platform to thousands of hackers at the Chaos Communication Camp to test for vulnerabilities before officially launching.

• Domscheit-Berg sees OpenLeaks as improving on WikiLeaks’ model. He wants to focus narrowly on providing a secure anonymous submission system, then pass leaks to media partners to publish. He hopes to incorporate OpenLeaks as a nonprofit to give it legal legitimacy. He also believes OpenLeaks’ security will surpass WikiLeaks’, in part because governments and spies have had time to study WikiLeaks and will try to infiltrate its successors.

• Domscheit-Berg’s relationship with Assange is bitter. Assange sees Domscheit-Berg as a “conman” and villain. Domscheit-Berg is motivated in part by a desire to outdo his former WikiLeaks colleagues. But he also admires Assange for kicking off the leaking movement. He sees OpenLeaks as the “engineers” improving on Assange’s original vision.

• The author provides an anecdote of Assange angrily calling him to complain about his coverage of OpenLeaks, illustrating the hostility between Assange and his former right-hand man.

• Julian Assange called the journalist to criticize him for relying on Daniel Domscheit-Berg as a source. Assange claimed that all of OpenLeaks’ ideas originated with him.

• OpenLeaks’ launch at the Chaos Communication Camp was a failure. Domscheit-Berg announced that the test site wasn’t ready yet, then asked hackers to test it for security flaws once it launched.

• The audience was very skeptical of OpenLeaks. Jacob Appelbaum suggested making all their software open-source so it could be checked for bugs. Others accused the organization of being infiltrated by intelligence agencies.

• Domscheit-Berg struggled to answer critical questions from the audience. He said OpenLeaks couldn’t afford to make their code open-source yet and asked for more time.

• John Gilmore and Andy Müller-Maguhn, two well-known figures, expressed limited support for OpenLeaks but said they weren’t convinced of its openness or integrity yet.

• The test platform for Die Tageszeitung newspaper remained offline for over 24 hours, angering its editor-in-chief. He saw it as a public relations disaster after promoting OpenLeaks.

• In summary, OpenLeaks’ launch was chaotic and created more doubts than enthusiasm. The organization faced criticism over lack of transparency, inability to launch the technology, and potential ties to intelligence agencies.

• Julian Assange and Daniel Domscheit-Berg (known then as Daniel Berg) founded WikiLeaks in 2006. Assange was a radical hacker while Berg was a corporate IT consultant looking to do more meaningful work.

• Though WikiLeaks claimed to have thousands of volunteers, for much of its first year it was essentially just Assange and Berg. They worked together remotely but also met in person, attending hacker conferences together and going on a long road trip to find secure data centers for WikiLeaks’ servers.

• Early on, WikiLeaks published leaks like Guantanamo Bay’s handbook, Swiss bank account info, and Scientology documents. Berg was inspired by Cryptome, a radical transparency site, and initially contacted Assange after reading about WikiLeaks on Cryptome.

• Berg grew up in Germany, fascinated by computers, robotics, and banned books. As a teen, he and his friends experimented with explosives and got into war driving, accessing open Wi-Fi networks. Berg studied computer science but found his IT consultant job unfulfilling, leading him to contact Assange.

• WikiLeaks’ launch of its OpenLeaks platform with Die Tageszeitung initially failed, unable to handle the traffic, disappointing the editors who had invested in the partnership and front-page story. Berg worried this damaged OpenLeaks’ reputation and ability to get future leaks.

• The summary outlines Berg’s backstory and path to meeting Assange, the early days of WikiLeaks with its exaggerated claims of size and resources, its initial publications, the failure of the OpenLeaks launch with Die Tageszeitung, and Berg’s concern about the impact.

• Daniel Domscheit-Berg, Julian Assange, and another figure known as “the Architect” were the central figures living together at Domscheit-Berg’s home in Wiesbaden, Germany while working on WikiLeaks.

• Domscheit-Berg and Assange had contrasting personalities and visions for WikiLeaks that sometimes led to conflicts. One issue was that Domscheit-Berg believed in dressing professionally for meetings while Assange preferred casual attire. Domscheit-Berg wanted WikiLeaks to become more professional but Assange wanted to remain “insurgent.”

• Assange was very paranoid about security and believed intelligence agencies were constantly monitoring them. Domscheit-Berg thought Assange was being overly sensational. Despite their differences, they worked well together and Domscheit-Berg quit his job to work full-time for WikiLeaks.

• “The Architect” was a skilled network engineer who joined them. He found WikiLeaks’ infrastructure to be poorly designed and demanded it be taken offline for six months to be rebuilt properly.

• Domscheit-Berg and Assange’s conflict intensified after Domscheit-Berg got married. Assange had warned Domscheit-Berg to dig up dirt on his new wife and criticized Domscheit-Berg for putting his full name on their apartment door. Assange later falsely accused Domscheit-Berg’s wife of working with intelligence agencies.

• Domscheit-Berg’s wife, Anke, had grown up in East Germany and had a close friend who was imprisoned as a political dissident. The Stasi secret police had tried to force her to become an informant by threatening her and her father but she refused. Her experiences with the oppressive Stasi regime left her with a hatred of intelligence agencies and secret surveillance. Assange’s false accusations about her working with intelligence agencies were deeply upsetting to her.

• An anonymous hacker known as the OpenLeaker is leading a workshop to test various WikiLeaks copycat sites for security vulnerabilities. He warns the hackers participating to only target sites that have given them permission and to be responsible with any vulnerabilities they find.

• Daniel Meredith, a developer for Al Jazeera, tests a site called StateLeaks.org. He easily finds the personal information of the site’s owner, Travis McCrea, a teenager. Meredith says the site has many security flaws that could allow someone to hack into it.

• The hackers find issues with many of the sites, including OpenLeaks. One site runs its public website and submissions system on the same server, risking leaks. OpenLeaks is missing an encryption certificate, which could allow an impostor site to trick leakers into submitting documents.

• The OpenLeaker says Tor, an anonymity tool, alone is not enough to protect leakers’ identities. He says OpenLeaks will use cover traffic - fake submissions with details modeled on real WikiLeaks data - to mask real leakers. He claims OpenLeaks has analyzed 1.5 years of WikiLeaks submissions to model this cover traffic.

• The OpenLeaker reveals to the author that he is actually “the Architect,” a key figure involved with building WikiLeaks’ technical infrastructure. He helped redesign WikiLeaks to be more secure but clashed with Assange over organizational issues. He says Assange blamed the technical team for missing a media opportunity while the site was down, even though the team had the site ready to relaunch and was waiting for Assange’s approval.

• The Architect left WikiLeaks due to conflicts with Assange over control and responsibility. He is now working with OpenLeaks to make their system more secure and anonymous.

• WikiLeaks was planning to release 15,000 sensitive documents in 2010. The Architect recruited 40 volunteers to help redact the documents over 4 weeks. But Assange then decided not to publish those documents and instead released 392,000 Iraq war documents. The Architect had to tell the volunteers their work was for nothing.

• Assange used an automated program to overredact names from the documents, which the Architect saw as sloppy. Reporters Without Borders and Amnesty International criticized WikiLeaks for this.

• Tensions rose between Assange, Domscheit-Berg, and the Architect. Assange accused Domscheit-Berg of insubordination and suspended him. The Architect and Domscheit-Berg then staged a partial shutdown of WikiLeaks to get Assange’s attention.

• Domscheit-Berg and the Architect left WikiLeaks in 2010 to start OpenLeaks. They took control of WikiLeaks’ submission system, archive, and 3,000 unpublished leaks with them. They said they didn’t trust Assange to properly protect the data. They offered to give the data back to WikiLeaks but said Assange never provided a secure way to transfer it.

• Assange called Domscheit-Berg an “unethical, unstable charlatan” who falsely represented himself. The Architect said he has no regrets about leaving WikiLeaks or taking its technology.

• In 2011, the Chaos Computer Club expelled Domscheit-Berg from their group, saying he damaged their reputation by presenting OpenLeaks at their event. Domscheit-Berg said this was unfair and that he didn’t need their permission. He believed the real reason was that the Club’s Andy Müller-Maguhn wanted control over OpenLeaks.

The key events are the release of sensitive documents, tensions and power struggles within WikiLeaks, the Architect and Domscheit-Berg leaving and essentially dismantling WikiLeaks to start OpenLeaks, the data and technology they took with them, and Domscheit-Berg’s expulsion from the Chaos Computer Club.

• Julian Assange asked guhn, a member of the Chaos Computer Club (CCC), to retrieve leaked materials from OpenLeakers (Domscheit-Berg and the Architect) that they took from WikiLeaks.

• Domscheit-Berg and the Architect refused to hand over the materials to guhn, citing that guhn was untrustworthy and responsible for previous leaks. They hinted the materials contained sensitive information.

• After Domscheit-Berg and the Architect left WikiLeaks, Assange tried coercing former members to help retrieve the leaked materials from OpenLeakers. He even had members sign NDAs with hefty penalties. However, the NDA itself leaked.

• guhn says Domscheit-Berg acted strangely after leaving WikiLeaks, leading guhn to believe Domscheit-Berg made a deal with government agencies. guhn thinks OpenLeaks may have been set up by intelligence agencies. Domscheit-Berg denies this.

• guhn asked OpenLeakers for three things: published leaked documents, the leaked submission software, and unpublished leaked documents. OpenLeakers eventually provided the published documents but refused to provide the other two, giving various excuses.

• guhn’s opinion of Domscheit-Berg soured after Domscheit-Berg published a tell-all book about WikiLeaks. guhn felt Domscheit-Berg violated hacker principles in doing so.

• At a hacker conference, guhn was upset OpenLeakers used CCC’s name despite not providing CCC access to their systems. The CCC board, including guhn, decided to oust Domscheit-Berg from CCC.

• A few days later, OpenLeakers deleted the keys to the unpublished leaked documents, encrypting them permanently. WikiLeaks claimed many sensitive leaked documents were lost, though Domscheit-Berg denies this.

In summary, a rift formed between WikiLeaks and OpenLeakers, leading to loss of access to many leaked documents. There were also allegations of suspicious behavior and government cooperation on both sides.

• Of the files WikiLeaks claimed to have, only the No-Fly List was actually included in the encrypted files they released. The others either didn’t exist or were stored elsewhere.
• WikiLeaks likely did have data from Icelandic banks, but details are unclear.
• WikiLeaks lost the Bank of America files, a victim of failing hard drives and poor organization before 2010.
• Domscheit-Berg and the Architect destroyed the keys to the encrypted files, erasing them thoroughly. The files contained 3,000 leaked documents from 8 months.
• By 2011, WikiLeaks had suffered major leaks from disgruntled insiders, including Domscheit-Berg’s book, cables to The Guardian, and a leaked NDA.
• In 2011, a WikiLeaks staffer uploaded their archive to the Pirate Bay. It included encrypted files marked “xyz.”
• David Leigh of The Guardian published the password to the encrypted files in his book.
• The “z” file contained the unredacted State Department cables, exposing sources.
• For 6 months, no one publicly noted the leak. Then Domscheit-Berg tipped off a German paper, which published a vague story. Internet users figured it out and spread it.
• John Young of Cryptome then published the full unredacted cables.
• WikiLeaks blamed The Guardian, who blamed WikiLeaks. Domscheit-Berg claims he revealed it to show WikiLeaks’ poor security and irresponsibility.
• The leak led to threats against sources named in the cables, like Chinese dissidents and Zimbabwean generals.

The key events are: WikiLeaks lost control of sensitive data through poor practices and infighting, the data was spread on the Pirate Bay, a Guardian journalist published the password, Domscheit-Berg revealed the resulting security failure, and the unredacted cables were published, damaging sources. It was a disastrous series of errors and leaks that seriously hurt WikiLeaks.

• An Iraqi Anglican church fled Iraq in fear of violent reprisals after the WikiLeaks release exposed one of its members as an informant. An Ethiopian journalist was interrogated and forced to flee after meeting with a US embassy informant.

• WikiLeaks never promised to redact or protect information from its sources. It only promised to protect the identities of leakers. When its leaks led to unintended consequences, it struggled to contain the damage.

• Daniel Domscheit-Berg, the founder of OpenLeaks, lives near the former Ravensbrück Nazi concentration camp in Germany. He defends his decision to destroy leaked files that were at risk of compromise. Despite criticism, he believes OpenLeaks can build trust through its technology and partnerships with media organizations.

• Domscheit-Berg sees leaking as exposing immoral acts that seem normal within a secret culture but horrific outside of it. He believes future megaleaks will likely involve privacy violations and sees the world in less black-and-white terms than Julian Assange. He thinks circumstances determine what should be secret or public.

• Domscheit-Berg and Assange were once idealistic partners but separated over differences in philosophy and approach. Domscheit-Berg asks that Assange stop lying about him but also wishes him good luck.

• The tactics of groups like Occupy Wall Street resemble those used earlier by leakers and activists like Birgitta Jónsdóttir, Daniel Ellsberg, and Phil Zimmermann. There is a persistence across generations to confront power and demand transparency.

• John Young and protesters at Columbia University in 1968 used nonviolent protest tactics like chanting slogans, allowing themselves to be arrested without resistance, and carrying signs to raise awareness of their cause.

• Modern protesters have adopted some of these tactics but now often carry cell phones that can record video, allowing them to capture and publicize police brutality. This “transparency movement” aims to monitor authority figures.

• Rich Jones created smartphone apps like OpenWatch and Cop Recorder that allow people to secretly record audio and video and upload it to his servers. He has obtained some disturbing recordings of police misconduct and hopes to build a large network of “reverse surveillance cameras.”

• Jones sees himself as continuing Julian Assange’s goal of enabling “scientific journalism” by providing primary source materials to the public. He wants to build technologies that make it easy for everyone to leak information.

• Napster was an early peer-to-peer file-sharing service that allowed people to share MP3 music files for free over the Internet. It was shut down in 2001 for violating copyright law.

• BitTorrent, released around the same time, was a file-sharing protocol rather than a centralized service. It has become hugely popular and accounts for a large portion of global Internet traffic. It shows how decentralized technologies can avoid legal consequences.

• Fabio Pietrosanti and Arturo Filastò created GlobaLeaks, open-source software that allows anyone to set up an anonymous leaking system. They aim to create a “worldwide, distributed leak amplification network” like BitTorrent. They want to expand leaking from a few large organizations to many small “leak nodes” run by various groups. This could reduce the risks for any one group.

• Although WikiLeaks raised awareness of whistleblowing, GlobaLeaks represents the “next logical step” in the leaking movement. Pietrosanti and Filastò aim to enable more groups to participate without taking on as much risk and responsibility as WikiLeaks.

• WikiLeaks was nearly taken down in 2011 after major finance companies cut off its funding in retaliation for its threat to “take down a bank or two.” Assange said this financial embargo had reduced WikiLeaks’ funding from over $300,000 to almost nothing.

• WikiLeaks faced financial troubles and obstacles around 2011. Julian Assange said the organization might have to shut down by the end of the year without resolving funding issues.

• WikiLeaks was dealing with many difficulties at the time. Assange was under house arrest, an American grand jury was investigating charges against him, supporters had abandoned the group after unredacted cables were published, and defectors had damaged the group.

• A young WikiLeaks volunteer said the organization was stagnant, broke, and a “decaying” version of its former self. He lamented that Assange had squandered the group’s political support and donations. However, he hoped that in the future, he or others might revive the spirit behind WikiLeaks.

• John Young, who co-founded Cryptome, posted a comment urging people to take risks, build their own platforms, and work to become “rich and famous” or fail trying, rather than be “middling.”

• The architect, a secretive engineer, gave no contact information. He said Daniel Domscheit-Berg was his “proxy.” The architect seemed to suggest he was working on a new, improved version of the WikiLeaks model.

• The summary suggests that even if WikiLeaks, BalkanLeaks, GlobaLeaks, or other groups fail, new architects are likely coding new antisecrecy tools and studying past efforts. They may revive and improve on the models of WikiLeaks and other pioneers.

• The book relies heavily on primary sources like emails, chat logs, and other documents. The author also conducted many hours of interviews. Dialogue was recounted by witnesses when possible. The summary is largely based on the author’s own reporting.

• Key sources for background in addition to reporting include Daniel Ellsberg’s Secrets, Suelette Dreyfus and Julian Assange’s Underground, Steven Levy’s Crypto, Daniel Domscheit-Berg’s Inside WikiLeaks, essays by Robert Manne and Nathaniel Rich, and reporting by Raffi Khatchadourian.

Here is a summary of the information in the passages:

• In 2011, the US announced plans to withdraw troops from Iraq by the end of the year. WikiLeaks had revealed information that strained negotiations to keep troops there longer.

• Around the same time, WikiLeaks was facing financial troubles and had to suspend operations.

• Chat logs revealed that Bradley Manning, an Army private, had actively shared classified information with Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks. This provided potential grounds for indicting Assange.

• There is an enormous amount of data in the world, and much of it is classified government information. For example, in 2010 there were 76.7 million classified US documents, many of which were top secret. With the rise of the Internet, it is difficult to keep information private.

• Daniel Ellsberg and Bradley Manning are two whistleblowers who leaked classified information. Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon Papers in 1971, revealing the US government had lied about aspects of the Vietnam War. Bradley Manning leaked classified information to WikiLeaks in 2010, revealing civilian deaths in Iraq, among other information.

• Ellsberg faced charges for leaking the Pentagon Papers but his case was dismissed. Manning was charged in a court martial and faced life in prison. Ellsberg expressed support for Manning, seeing similarities between them as whistleblowers who believed government secrecy was hiding the truth from citizens.

• The leaks revealed failures in government security that allowed so much classified data to be accessed and shared. But government officials argued their focus had been on outside threats, not insider leaks.

• Manning described feeling isolated and like he had a “double life” in the Army. He said he leaked information to WikiLeaks out of a desire to spark debate about foreign policy and reveal the “true nature of 21st century asymmetric warfare.”

That covers the key highlights and events in the passages on whistleblowers Daniel Ellsberg and Bradley Manning leaking classified information, the prosecution they faced, and the context around government secrecy and security failures revealed by their actions. Please let me know if you would like me to explain or expand on any part of the summary.

• Julian Assange founded WikiLeaks in 2006 to publish secret and classified information from anonymous sources.

• As a teenager in Australia, Assange was a hacker who went by the name “Mendax.” He was caught and pleaded guilty to 24 counts of hacking, but avoided jail time.

• Assange was raised by his mother, Christine, who was a visual artist. They moved frequently, living in over a dozen places by the time Assange was a teenager. His childhood was chaotic and unsettled.

• As a teen, Assange accessed the Pentagon’s 8th Command Group computers. His hacking career ended after this intrusion was detected.

• Assange studied mathematics, physics, neuroscience, and philosophy at university. He was most interested in solving complex problems and puzzles. He created an early version of Wikipedia called “The Puzzle Hunt” for students at his university.

• WikiLeaks first major leaks were in 2010: the “Collateral Murder” video, the Afghanistan war logs, and the Iraq war logs. These leaks were given to WikiLeaks by Chelsea Manning.

• WikiLeaks is controversial, with some seeing it as a threat to national security and others seeing it as a champion of transparency and whistleblowing. Major figures like Hillary Clinton and Mike Pompeo have called for Assange’s arrest.

• Cryptome is a website similar to WikiLeaks, run by John Young. It has published secret and leaked documents since the 1990s. Young views WikiLeaks as reckless and too politically motivated.

• The cypherpunks were activists in the 1980s and 1990s who advocated for cryptography, privacy, and anonymity online. They influenced later groups like WikiLeaks and Cryptome. Major figures include Timothy May, Eric Hughes, and David Chaum.

Here is a summary of the passages:

• The first passage cites an anonymous source.

• The second and third passages are quotes from Julian Assange’s childhood.

• The fourth passage is a quote from an article written by John Cook in Radar magazine in August 2007.

• The fifth passage refers to Julian Assange and Suelette Dreyfus.

• The sixth through tenth passages are all quotes from Julian Assange on various platforms.

• The eleventh passage cites Andrew Fowler’s book The Most Dangerous Man in the World.

• The twelfth and thirteenth passages are quotes from Julian Assange’s blog and e-mails.

• The fourteenth through seventeenth passages are e-mail exchanges between Julian Assange and others.

• The eighteenth passage cites an article by Sabine Helmers.

• The nineteenth passage is a quote from Jim Bell.

• The twentieth passage refers to a magazine article about DigiCash.

• The twenty-first through twenty-third passages are quotes and references to ideas from Jim Bell.

• The twenty-fourth through twenty-sixth passages are e-mails in response to Jim Bell.

• The twenty-seventh passage cites an article by May referencing “BlackNet Worries.”

• The twenty-eighth passage cites a paper by Wim van Eck on electromagnetic radiation.

• The twenty-ninth passage refers to e-mail exchanges between Julian Assange and Jim Bell.

• The thirtieth passage cites an e-mail from John Young.

• The thirty-first passage is a quote from Julian Assange.

• The thirty-second passage introduces Julian Assange’s work on Rubberhose.

• The thirty-third and thirty-fourth passages are quotes from Julian Assange related to Rubberhose.

• The thirty-fifth passage refers to Julian Assange registering the website Leaks.org.

• The thirty-sixth and thirty-seventh passages are quotes from Julian Assange.

• The thirty-eighth passage is a summary of ideas from the “Conspiracy as Governance” paper.

• The thirty-ninth passage is a quote from Julian Assange’s blog.

• The fortieth passage is a quote attributed to Oscar Wilde.

• The forty-first passage refers to FOIA requests by William Black.

• The forty-second passage refers to documents on MI6 and the PSIA posted by Cryptome.org.

• The forty-third passage refers to documents from a CIA agent promised to be published by Cryptome.org.

• The forty-fourth passage is an e-mail from Julian Assange to John Young.

• The forty-fifth passage indicates that John Young unsubscribed from Julian Assange’s mailing list.

• The forty-sixth passage gives a date for Jim Bell’s release from prison.

• The forty-seventh passage indicates the start of a new chapter on “The Onion Routers.”

• The forty-eighth quote is from Jacob Appelbaum.

• The forty-ninth through fifty-first quotes are also from Jacob Appelbaum.

• The fifty-second passage cites an article by Nathaniel Rich.

• The fifty-third passage refers to some websites on the Tor network.

• The fifty-fourth passage cites a study on tracing Tor users.

• The fifty-fifth passage cites work by Steven J. Murdoch on fingerprinting Tor Hidden Services.

• The fifty-sixth passage cites a book by Raymond Smullyan.

• The fifty-seventh passage cites Andrew Lewman discussing Tor nodes being blocked in China.

• The fifty-eighth quote is from Jacob Appelbaum.

• The fifty-ninth passage describes Julian Assange’s living situation and work scanning documents.

• The sixtieth passage cites an e-mail from Julian Assange.

• The sixty-first passage cites Bruce Schneier.

• The sixty-second passage cites an article by Raffi Khatchadourian.

• WikiLeaks released hundreds of thousands of classified US government documents beginning in 2010, including war logs from Afghanistan and Iraq, State Department cables, and files on prisoners at Guantanamo Bay. The releases revealed cases of civilian deaths, corruption, and human rights abuses that had not previously been documented.

• The US government condemned the leaks and investigated WikiLeaks and its founder Julian Assange. Politicians called Assange a terrorist, and Vice President Biden compared him to a “hi-tech terrorist.” WikiLeaks was cut off from funding sources and hosting services.

• Assange was accused of sexual misconduct in Sweden and took refuge in Ecuador’s London embassy to avoid extradition. He saw the accusations as a smear campaign against him.

• WikiLeaks received secret documents from a young US intelligence analyst named Chelsea Manning (then known as Bradley Manning). She leaked databases with reports on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, diplomatic cables, and files on Guantanamo Bay detainees.

• A private security firm called HBGary Federal planned a smear campaign against WikiLeaks in 2011 to discredit the organization. HBGary Federal’s servers were hacked by the hacktivist group Anonymous in retaliation, and HBGary Federal’s CEO Aaron Barr resigned.

• WikiLeaks partnered with major media organizations like The Guardian, The New York Times, Der Spiegel, and others to analyze and distribute information from the leaks. The leaks revealed many significant and newsworthy stories, with one report finding that nearly half of The New York Times’s issues in 2011 cited WikiLeaks documents.

• The US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency or DARPA funded the development of many technologies that influenced WikiLeaks, like the Internet, cryptography, and more. DARPA’s director condemned WikiLeaks for possibly putting soldiers’ lives at risk. But a Pentagon review found no evidence the leaks led to casualties.

• WikiLeaks was compared to the 1971 Pentagon Papers leak. But WikiLeaks published hundreds of thousands of documents from many government and corporate sources, not just the Pentagon and military.

That covers the key highlights and events around WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, Chelsea Manning, HBGary Federal, and reactions to WikiLeaks’s major leaks. Let me know if you would like me to explain or expand on any part of the summary.

Here is a summary in 4 sentences:

WikiLeaks received and published confidential data from various sources. In response, companies worked to prevent data leaks and governments prosecuted individuals for leaking information. The hacker group Anonymous launched cyber attacks against various organizations including financial institutions, governments, and the Church of Scientology. However, some hackers use their skills to find and report security vulnerabilities to organizations.

• Journalists and whistleblowers exposing government secrets have faced legal prosecution. Examples include Stephen Kim, John Kiriakou, and Richard Silverstein. However, President Obama has said whistleblowing “should be encouraged.”

• In 2011, Iceland’s Grimsvotn volcano eruption disrupted air travel. Iceland’s infrastructure has been strained in recent years. According to a 2010 Der Spiegel interview, Iceland lacks technical experts and entrepreneurs.

• Iceland aims to become a haven for whistleblowers and journalistic freedom. Several leak websites have launched but struggle to obtain and publish actual leaks. BalkanLeaks published leaks on Bulgaria’s politics and judiciary. However, Bulgaria has limited press freedom and journalists face threats of violence.

• Birgitta Jónsdóttir, an Icelandic poet and activist, has advocated for press freedom, transparency laws, and making Iceland a “Switzerland of Bits.” Iceland suffered an economic collapse in 2008.

• Leaked cables showed the U.S. concerned with Bulgarian organized crime. However, some cables were heavily redacted, raising questions of “cable cooking.” Leaked cables revealed trivial details and the U.S. threatening to withhold aid over unpaid parking tickets.

• Whistleblowing sites struggle with too much data but also lack of leaks. They face risks to anonymity and legal threats. Laws in any one country may offer limited protection given the global nature of the Internet. Stronger laws are still needed to protect whistleblowers and journalists.

In summary, while Iceland aims to become a transparency haven, whistleblowers and journalists continue to face significant threats and prosecution. And although leaks have exposed important details, leak sites struggle to authenticate and process available data. Simply passing laws in any one country offers limited protection in today’s globalized, digital world.

Here is a summary of the information:

• On February 16, 2010, the U.S. Embassy in Sofia, Bulgaria downplayed information from WikiLeaks cables and said their cooperation with Bulgaria speaks for itself.

• On May 26, 2011, the Bulgarian PM dismissed alleged ties to Russian company Lukoil from WikiLeaks cables and called it “yellow press.”

• On August 18, 2011, a cable called the Bulgarian PM an “Armani-clad tough guy.”

• On September 22, 2011, Bulgaria and Romania’s applications to join the EU’s Schengen zone were vetoed.

• Daniel Domscheit-Berg, a former WikiLeaks member, called Julian Assange “dangerous” and “a malicious conman” who was “raised by wolves.”

• WikiLeaks had issues with methodology and credibility according to Reporters Without Borders.

• WikiLeaks upset sources by how it released information and spoke about the Afghan war documents leak.

• Domscheit-Berg and Assange lived together for two months. WikiLeaks used temporary SIM cards and avoided most payment methods.

• A WikiLeaks volunteer hacked a reporter, as revealed in Assange’s autobiography.

• WikiLeaks threatened leakers with a $20 million penalty for leaking information about WikiLeaks.

• There were calls for WikiLeaks to stop gagging dissent.

• WikiLeaks tweeted about 5 gigabytes of Bank of America data.

• Julian Assange’s password was published.

• Unredacted cables were released, to applause and criticism. The Guardian blamed Assange.

• The leaks put lives at risk in Zimbabwe, China, Iraq, and Ethiopia.

• The world was watching as protesters were abused. Anthony Bologna was fined for pepper spraying women.

• Over 26 million used Napster, which faced legal issues. It led to a drop in music industry revenue. Napster went bankrupt in 2002.

• The leaks show a powerful system of information control collapsing. The machine fighting secrecy killed secrets, with troubling and liberating results.

War: 5, 21–26, 34–37, 40–42, 45, 53–55 Pentagon Papers: 11–13, 14–15, 34–37, 40–41, 44, 45 Ellsberg, Daniel: 15–18, 21–26, 34–37, 40–42, 44–45, 53–55 Assange, Julian: 102–8, 112–13, 114, 117, 123–24, 125–29, 156–60, 163–64, 174–79, 257–58, 285–88, 294–98, 300, 302, 303–4, 306–8, 312–13, 320–21 Domscheit-Berg, Daniel: 282–85, 287, 294, 296–98, 299, 303, 306–8, 309–12 WikiLeaks: 102, 112–13, 114, 122, 125, 126, 129–30, 138–39, 151–52, 156–60, 164–66, 174–79, 184–86, 213, 214, 285–88, 294–98, 299–300, 302, 303–4, 306–9 Anonymous: 183–86, 192–95, 210–15, 316 Appelbaum, Jacob: 135–38, 151, 152–56, 160–68, 266–67 May, Tim: 75–77, 79–92 Chaum, David: 65–70, 76, 77, 79–80, 89, 117–19 cypherpunks: 78–83, 85–88, 89–92, 96–98, 111–25 Manning, Bradley: 28–29, 34, 39–40, 43–46, 98

Here’s a summary of the key points related to 84:

• Cryptographers like David Chaum, Charlie Merritt, and Philip Zimmermann developed encryption techniques like public key encryption, digital cash, anonymous remailers, and PGP in the 1980s.

• The U.S. government tried to restrict strong encryption through laws like the Arms Export Control Act and the Clipper Chip program. However, software like PGP spread rapidly online.

• Tim May and Eric Hughes were early proponents of strong cryptography who believed it enabled digital freedoms and privacy. They helped found the Cypherpunks mailing list to promote anonymous communications.

• Cryptography has both military and political implications. Some saw it enabling anonymous whistleblowing and activism, while others worried it would enable criminal plans and communications.

• There were debates around cryptography’s impact on intellectual property, privacy, and regulation. The government saw the need to balance privacy and security, while technologists insisted on strong crypto as a digital freedom.

• Anonymous remailers like Julf’s Penet, Mixmaster, and Cypherpunk Remailer enabled anonymous email communications using encryption. They showed the potential of tools like onion routing and mix networks.

• Cryptography’s spread demonstrated the challenges of controlling information flows in an era of increasingly networked communications. Once strong encryption was released, there was no going back.

• Discussions of “information markets” and digitally enforced anarchy highlighted some of the radical possibilities people saw in widespread strong crypto. Tim May’s “BlackNet” concept illustrated these speculative scenarios.

Does this help summarize the key points related to 84 (cryptography and its implications in the late 1980s and early 1990s)? Let me know if you would like me to clarify or expand on any part of the summary.

Cryption: An Australian hacker magazine cofounded in the 1980s by Julian Assange. It focused on privacy, encryption, and other cyberlibertarian issues.

Cottrell’s Mixmaster remailer: An anonymous email remailer created in the 1990s that WikiLeaks initially used. It chained multiple servers to hide email origins.

Cypherpunk remailer: An anonymous email network favored by cypherpunks like John Young. WikiLeaks used several cypherpunk remailers.

Helsingius’s Penet remailer: A popular anonymous remailer used by WikiLeaks in its early days. It was run by Julf Helsingius but shut down under legal pressure.

Improvements to remailers: Cypherpunks made remailers more secure by chaining multiple servers, using encryption, and other methods. These improved remailers were used by WikiLeaks.

Young’s Cryptome site: John Young’s controversial transparency site that published leaked documents. WikiLeaks was inspired by and initially collaborated with Cryptome.

MIT’s RSA encryption: An early public key encryption system created at MIT that WikiLeaks used to secure submissions and communications.

Rubberhose: A cypherpunk tool that generated cryptographic keys under torture. It aimed to protect users even under extreme duress.

Salin and his systems: Phil Salin was an Australian hacker who cofounded Cryption with Assange. He helped create anonymous systems that WikiLeaks later used.

Secrets: Daniel Ellsberg’s book on leaking the Pentagon Papers inspired WikiLeaks’s radical transparency beliefs.

SSL encryption: An encryption protocol used to secure websites that WikiLeaks utilized.

“Security without Identification”: A 1985 essay by David Chaum that advocated anonymous electronic transactions and motivated cypherpunks like Assange.

Tchobanov: A Bulgarian technology expert who helped WikiLeaks set up infrastructure in 2010 to 2011, including web hosting and servers.

TEMPEST: An NSA technology that can intercept electronic communications. Cypherpunks aimed to circumvent TEMPEST surveillance.

Tor: An anonymity network funded by the U.S. government that WikiLeaks relied on. Tor hid users’ identities but left data exposed, leading to WikiLeaks’s security breach.

Zimmermann’s PGP: Phil Zimmermann’s encryption software that WikiLeaks initially used to secure communications and submissions.