Quotes About Security

The social structure of any nation-state is ultimately determined by its security arrangements.

The FBI hates and fears strong crypto.

I hate e-mail," John says. Harvard Li stares him in the eye for a while. "What do you mean?" "The concept is good. The execution is poor. People don't observe any security precautions. A message arrives claiming to be from Harvard Li, they believe it's really from Harvard Li. But this message is just a pattern of magnetized spots on a spinning disk somewhere. Anyone could forge it.

These Burbclaves! These citystates! So small, so insecure, that just about everything, like not mowing your lawn, or playing your stereo too loud, becomes a national security issue.

The padlocks are carried away in pomp and laid out on the stone bench where important men make it their business to keep an eye on them.

These are one-time pads.

Maybe we should start an institute on nonviolent terrorism." "Catchy. But if it's not violent, there's no terror involved.

CRYPTOLOGY, as the union of cryptography and cryptanalysis is called.

They are running a secure operating system you've never heard of," he explained. "It's called Shiny Hat." "Shiny Hat." "Yes. The most clinically paranoid operating system in the world. Since you have an overdeveloped sense of irony, Stokes, you might like to know that we acquired it from hackers who were specifically worried about being eavesdropped on by shadowy government entities. Now they work for us.

They were ushered through the doors and past a range of security checkpoints into the offices of White Label Industries LLC, whose logo was a featureless white rectangle.

But there was one area in which hackers were routinely underestimated, and that was lock picking. For them, picking locks was a nice way to kick back and relax after a long day of doing pen tests on corporate networks.

He finds it shocking that in a country actively embroiled in the middle of the greatest war in history—in a country run by belligerent Fascists for God's sake—two truckloads of heavily armed enemy soldiers can just drive around freely, protected by nothing except a couple of five-dollar tarps. Criminy! What kind of a sorry operation is this?

hydrological warfare.

protects like a stack of telephone books.

It was black, the proper color for domestic terrorism during the evening hours

Avi, with his genius for imagining the most horrific conceivable worst-case scenarios, demanded that they have their own machine, and that Randy and the others go through its kernel code one line at a time to verify that there were no security holes. In

Smart, rabidly paranoid people are the backbone of cryptology

Why couldn't I fill my hard drive with random bytes, so that individual files would not be discernible? Their very existence would be hidden in the noise, like a striped tiger in tall grass. And we could continually stream random noise back and forth to each other.

Van Eck phreaking

He has an important job: Protect the yard. Sometimes people come in and out of the yard. Most of the time, they are good people, and he doesn't bother them. He doesn't know why they are good people. He just knows it. Sometimes they are bad people, and he has to do bad things to them to make them go away. This is fitting and proper.

IARPA—the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Agency, which has been running this thing until now—thinks other countries might have, or might soon have, access to . . . others like Erzsebet.

economic—when economic security and basic materialistic needs are guaranteed to all—then incentive will not disappear, but be of a different sort, increasing in strength and determination, producing true greatness, not the kind of transparent, transient "greatness" which present incentives produce.

Most important of all, do not be afraid. You cannot "die" in any event, so there is nothing to be afraid of. Be aware of The Process unfolding, and quietly know that everything is going to be okay with you.

That made me happy. That was my Anchor.