Quotes from Heather Brooke

It is scrutiny by the general public that keeps the powerful honest.

Our printing press is the Internet. Our coffee houses are social networks.

In the soil of ignorance, fear can easily be sown.

Hackers often describe what they do as playfully creative problem solving.

Democracy isn't just for people in the Middle East, but Britons, too.

It is quite surreal having a film made about your life. The whole process of turning real life into drama is interesting in itself, but even more so when it is your own life being put into the narrative forge.

I pine for a return to the type of old-school journalism and the tough newspapermen and women of the Thirties.

Unwarranted search and seizure by the government officials was unacceptable to the American revolutionaries. Shouldn't it be unacceptable in the digital age, too?

Secrecy can be sexy. It's essential to any good mystery novel.

Slightly embarrassing admission: Even when I was a kid, I used to have these little spy books, and I would, like, see what everybody was doing in my neighborhood and log it down.

The monarchy is a part of the state. It exists to serve the people.

Hackerspaces are the digital-age equivalent of English Enlightenment coffee houses. They are places open to all, indifferent to social status, and where ideas and knowledge hold primary value.

[There's] a culture clash that's happening all over the world between bewigged and bestockinged officials who think that they can rule over us, [and] a public who is no longer content with that arrangement.

If the public can't see justice being done, or afford the costs of justice, then the entire system becomes little more than a cozy club solely for the benefit of judges, lawyers and their lackeys, a sort of care in the community for the upper middle classes.

For information to be useful, it should be dynamic, searchable, and accessible.

I'm very optimistic, but I'm optimistic about individuals, not institutions.

A lack of government oversight hasn't hindered the Internet. Quite the opposite. A hands-off approach is largely responsible for its fantastic growth and success.

When journalism is treated as just another widget in a commercial enterprise, the focus isn't on truth, verification or public good, but productivity and output.

I trained as a journalist in America where paying sources is frowned upon. Now I work in the U.K. where there is a more flexible attitude.

The way the Establishment deals with people like me is to ignore them. When you become unignorable, they will try to smear you, and that's what I feared for a long time. Now I have somehow vaulted into this space where it's difficult for someone to smear me because it would look as though they were being vindictive and spiteful.