This Machine Kills Secrets: How WikiLeakers, Cypherpunks, and Hacktivists Aim to Free the World's Information

The revolution will not be televised. It will be digitized. This is the first full account of the cypherpunks who are changing our world, by the Forbes reporter whose work has made global headlines.

Young men and women who grew up in the digital age are expressing their dissatisfaction with the government, the military, and corporations in a radical new way. They are building machines—writing cryptographic software codes—that are designed to protect the individual in a cloak of anonymity, while uploading institutional secrets for public consumption. From Australia to Iceland, North Africa to Wall Street, organizations like WikiLeaks, Anonymous, and OpenLeaks are enabling whistleblowers like never before, transforming the next generation's notion of what activism can be. In
This Machine Kills Secrets, reporter Andy Greenberg connects the dots, from the first rustlings of the Pentagon Papers to the Clipper Chip in the '90s to the pepper spray clouds on Wall Street. Greenberg's unrivaled access to such major players as Julian Assange, Daniel Domscheit-Berg, and a shadowy figure, previously only presumed to exist and known as the Architect, brings readers into the trenches of the new digital revolution.
This compulsively readable book shows why encryption is a vital tool for social change in an age dominated by huge governments and corporations. Being able to vote in private without fear of retribution changed the world's politics forever. Greenberg demonstrates that being able to reveal the secrets of those in power without fear of retribution may do so again.