Quotes from Joseph Menn

Security is about how you configure power, and who has access to what. That is political," Song said.

The phreakers were a diverse group, including John Draper, who called himself Cap'n Crunch after learning that whistles given out with that breakfast cereal could be used to blow 2600 hertz, which allowed free calls.

It wasn't just that politicians needed to think more about technology and its unique multidisciplinary role in the world. Those in technology needed to think a lot more about politics.

If the combination of mindless, profit-seeking algorithms, dedicated geopolitical adversaries, and corrupt US opportunists over the past few years has taught us anything, it is that serious applied thinking is a form of critical infrastructure. The best hackers are masters of applied thinking, and we cannot afford to ignore them.

The dotcoms as a whole were little more than a publicly supported pyramid scheme built on the long-true presumption that an even dumber investor was just down the road. With more finesse Kleiner Perkins', John Doerr called the process, "The largest legal creation of wealth, in the history of the planet.