9 October 2012
After re-reading on Kindle the book is even better. Searching, cross-linking and assembling one or more of Greenberg's characters provides different narratives than his unsettling multiple disjointedness. Read Tim May next to Julian Assange, Mudge next to John Gilmore, Adrian Lamo next to Jacob Appelbaum, Daniel Domscheit-Berg next to Phil Zimmermann. With Kindle these juxtapositions, and others, your own book can be read next to Greenberg's. The book should be put on the web for many variable readings -- it is that valuable to mine, reconfigure, rewrite, argue with its characters and author.
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This is a well-researched book that doesn't settle for glib exploitation of fictional ex nihilo WikiLeaks singularity.
Andy Greenberg has invented a gallery of "characters" (me among them) from selected debris of interviews for "This Machine Kills Secrets," an exceptionally informative account of the technical and philosophical global battle for control of communication between lock-step hierarchies of authorities armed with military-grade secrecy and armored with lie-dispensing public relations and diversely distributed, far smarter and agile, anarchical dissidents intending to swarm and undermine official "full-spectrum dominance" of information.
These challengers of abusive control of information see official secrecy as destructive of democracy and unfettered, unspied-upon communication among the citizenry. Their main weapon against the Big Iron Arms of authority (military, espionage, legislation, finance) is pervasive public encryption to protect personal privacy, identity and communication -- supplemented by creative ways to work around authoritative information control and censorship.
With unprecedented access to mostly little known key participants Greenberg amply describes the decades-long campaign for public secrecy and privacy, the deployment of unauthorized disclosures, anonymity, pseudonymity, untraceability, subterfuge, chicanery, feints, ploys, humor and ricidule for direct open confrontation and defiance of authority as exemplary demonstration of digital democracy in action.
This will serve as a worldwide guide to understand why authorities -- gov, com, edu, org -- dread loss of centralized power through the uncontrolled, decentralized, anonymous, open Internet and are feverishly, stupidly attempting to devise Big Iron control measures. As Greenberg warns -- hark journalists, himself, Forbes and ilk -- "get used to it, this machine for killing secrets will not stop."
I.e., a leak of the book's contents, list of characters and index: [URL deleted by Amazon, see cryptome.org, August 21, 2012]
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