Quotes from Barton Gellman

I don't say I never use Facebook, but I often think about closing my account.

NSA surveillance is a complex subject - legally, technically and operationally.

When the 'New York Times' revealed the warrantless surveillance of voice calls, in December 2005, the telephone companies got nervous.

Federal prosecutors want to indict Julian Assange for making public a great many classified documents.

I don't think Cheney started off in 2000 with a burning desire to become vice-president. I think the prospect gradually became more appealing, and he goosed the process.

Doctrines don't govern policy. They provide a conceptual framework by which policymakers approach their decisions. But there is no such thing as a doctrine that controls policy in every way.

Well-secured files don't do you much good if you lose them in a fire or hard drive crash.

The federal government is often said in militia circles to have made wholesale seizures of power, at times by subterfuge. A leading grievance holds that the 16th Amendment, which authorizes the federal income tax, was ratified through fraud.

The causes and severity of NSA infractions vary widely. One in 10 incidents is attributed to a typographical error in which an analyst enters an incorrect query and retrieves data about U.S phone calls or emails.

Governors normally have jurisdiction over public health emergencies, but a widespread biological attack would cross state boundaries.

On average, since 9/11, the FBI reckons that just over 100,000 terrorism leads each year have come over the transom. Analysts and agents designate them as immediate, priority or routine, but the bureau says every one is covered.

The Obama administration has provided almost no public information about the NSA's compliance record.

True net-heads sometimes resort to punctuation cartoons to get around the absence of inflection.

The IronClad is faster than most thumb drives but far slower than a standard hard drive. Boot up, application launch and other Windows operations feel sluggish, though still usable.

For personal use, I recommend the free and open-source Truecrypt, which comes in flavors for Windows, Mac and Linux.

Scores of armed antigovernment groups, some of them far more radical, have formed or been revived during the Obama years, according to law-enforcement agencies and outside watchdogs.

The Obama administration, like those before it, promotes a disturbingly narrow interpretation of the Fourth Amendment, misapplying the facts of old analog cases to a radically different digital world.

In 1995, Glaxo bought Burroughs Wellcome and became the presumptive leader in AIDS therapy.

The first time I set out to find George F. Kennan, in 1982, I had just turned 21, begun my final semester at Princeton University and noticed with astonishment that the senior thesis deadline had crept to within four months.

Friend of mine, a smart journalist, had his iPad stolen. He couldn't help that - the thief broke into his house. But his private, personal data wasn't stolen, exactly. Donated, more like. He had no passcode set on the iPad.

Snowden is an orderly thinker, with an engineer's approach to problem-solving.

The modern era of continuity planning began under President Ronald Reagan.

The National Security Agency has broken privacy rules or overstepped its legal authority thousands of times each year since Congress granted the agency broad new powers in 2008, according to an internal audit and other top-secret documents.

China and Russia are regarded as the most formidable cyber threats.