Quotes from Barton Gellman

During the morning rush hour on March 20, 1995, the Japanese cult Aum Shinrikyo placed packages on five subway trains converging on Tokyo's central station. When punctured, the packages spread vaporized Sarin through the subway cars and then into the stations as the trains pulled in.

The first reports of AIDS closely followed the inauguration of President Ronald Reagan, whose 'family values' agenda and alliance with Christian conservatives associated AIDS with deviance and sin.

Searches of al Qaeda sites in Afghanistan, undertaken since American-backed forces took control there, are not known to have turned up a significant cache of nuclear materials.

Of all Iraq's rocket scientists, none drew warier scrutiny abroad than Modher Sadeq-Saba Tamimi.

I have no evidence of any relationship between IRS and NSA.

For months, Obama administration officials attacked Snowden's motives and said the work of the NSA was distorted by selective leaks and misinterpretations.

Snowden has been very sparing about discussing his early life or his personal life.

By now, you've heard endless warnings about the risk of short, trivial passwords. There's a good chance you ignore them.

A minimum precaution: keep your anti-malware protections up to date, and install security updates for all your software as soon as they arrive.

Most computers today have built in backup software.

I do read licenses, and they aggravate me, but a computer isn't much good without software. When I need a product, I hold my nose and click 'agree.'

Holding our own government to account for the use of its power is, in my view, the highest mission of a U.S. news organization.

Some misunderstandings are hard to cure.

In Africa through the 1990s, with notable exceptions in Senegal and Uganda, nearly all the ruling powers denied they had a problem with AIDS.

It turns out that American Express honors recurring payments even if the vendor is unable to supply an accurate card number and expiration date. An Amex phone representative said this is a feature, not a bug, which makes sure my bills are paid.

Rolf Ekeus, his appearance can deceive. He looks somewhere between an international diplomat and a mad professor. He's got that sort of shock of white hair and a slightly absent-minded way of speaking. But he's extremely sharp and very serious about power relationships.

Smallpox, which spreads by respiration and kills roughly one in three of those infected, took hundreds of millions of lives during a recorded history dating to Pharaonic Egypt. The last case was in 1978, and the disease was declared eradicated on May 8, 1980.

Activists and geeks, standing together, are demonstrating powers beyond the reach of government control.

Obama's ascendancy unhinged the radical right, offering a unified target to competing camps of racial, nativist and religious animus.

Ecuador has never stated flatly that it would give asylum to Edward Snowden.

There is evidence that some of al Qaeda's nuclear efforts over the years met with swindles and false leads.

Unsettling signs of al Qaeda's aims and skills in cyberspace have led some government experts to conclude that terrorists are at the threshold of using the Internet as a direct instrument of bloodshed.

It no longer counts as remarkable that Egyptians organized their uprising on social media.

Pakistan has dozens of laboratories and production and storage sites scattered across the country. After developing warheads with highly enriched uranium, it has more recently tried to do the same with more-powerful and compact plutonium.