Heather Brooke Quotes
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Politicians often claim secrecy is necessary for good governance or national security.
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It is scrutiny by the general public that keeps the powerful honest.
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You can't hope for a better result as a campaigner than to have the prime minister announce a major policy change within 48 hours of your documentary.
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A lot of people have a lot to gain from peddling scare stories about cyber warfare.
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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.
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There's not a self-regulating group of nice fair-playing people in politics. There are a lot of dodgy people in politics.
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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.
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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.
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We are not naughty children, and the state is not our parent.
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I've always worked on the fringe of the British press establishment, carving out this niche for myself.
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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.
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Diplomacy has always involved dinners with ruling elites, backroom deals and clandestine meetings. Now, in the digital age, the reports of all those parties and patrician chats can be collected in one enormous database. And once collected in digital form, it becomes very easy for them to be shared.
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Traditional publishers require an author to submit a manuscript six months in advance, and if pressed, no later than two or three.
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I know people don't like America very much, but the one thing it's very good on is local government.
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We need to codify our values and build consensus around what we want from a free society and a free Internet. We need to put into law protections for our privacy and our right to speak and assemble.
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The hacker community may be small, but it possesses the skills that are driving the global economies of the future.
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In the soil of ignorance, fear can easily be sown.
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You don't make a system more effective by increasing the number of regulators.
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Whether I'll get the chance to write fiction, I don't know. I could do political conspiracy thrillers, couldn't I? With an investigative journalist as the heroine.
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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.
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It used to cost money to disclose and distribute information. In the digital age it costs money not to.
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There is a very intense culture of secrecy in Britain that hasn't yet been dismantled. What passes for transparency here would serve any secret society well.
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I'm very optimistic, but I'm optimistic about individuals, not institutions.
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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.