Quotes by Barton Gellman

No one ought to be under any illusion that Cheney privately thinks himself a failure.

First developed as a weapon by the U.S. Army, VX is an oily, odorless and tasteless liquid that kills on contact with the skin or when inhaled in aerosol form. Like other nerve agents, it is treatable in the first minutes after exposure but otherwise leads swiftly to fatal convulsions and respiratory failure.

Most computers today have built in backup software.

I favor pocket-sized hard drives that travel between home and office, syncing with computers on both ends.

Dell fills its computers with crapware, collecting fees from McAfee and other vendors to pre-install trial versions.

Given the volume of PC sales and the way McAfee runs its operation, I imagine there must be thousands of phantom subscribers - folks who signed up once upon a time and left the software behind two or three computers ago.

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

U.S. intelligence services routinely use collection methods against foreigners that foreseeably - with certainty - ingest high volumes of U.S. communications as well.

The $52.6 billion U.S. intelligence arsenal is aimed mainly at unambiguous adversaries, including al-Qaida, North Korea and Iran. But top-secret budget documents reveal an equally intense focus on one purported ally: Pakistan.

The government of Sudan, employing a back channel direct from its president to the Central Intelligence Agency, offered in the early spring of 1996 to arrest Osama bin Laden and place him in Saudi custody, according to officials and former officials in all three countries.

By now, youve heard endless warnings about the risk of short, trivial passwords. Theres a good chance you ignore them.

On March 12, 2004, acting attorney general James B. Comey and the Justice Departments top leadership reached the brink of resignation over electronic surveillance orders that they believed to be illegal.

Enclosed by a sand berm four miles around and 160 feet high, the Baghdad Nuclear Research Facility entombs what remains of reactors bombed by Israel in 1981 and the United States in 1991. It has stored industrial and medical wastes, along with spent reactor fuel.

Iraq has the most extensive petrochemical industry in the Middle East and a wealth of vaccine factories, single-cell protein research labs, medical and veterinary manufacturing centers and water treatment plants.

Daniel Ellsberg showed tremendous courage back in the 70s.

Early in 1986, the World Health Organization in Geneva still regarded AIDS as an ailment of the promiscuous few.

You dont need to be a spook to care about encryption. If you travel with your computer or keep it in a place where other people can put their hands on it, youre vulnerable.

The Patriot Act unleashed the FBI to search your email, travel and credit records without even a suspicion of wrongdoing.

Snowden grants that NSA employees by and large believe in their mission and trust the agency to handle the secrets it takes from ordinary people - deliberately, in the case of bulk records collection, and incidentally, when the content of American phone calls and e-mails are swept into NSA systems along with foreign targets.

Social engineering, the fancy term for tricking you into giving away your digital secrets, is at least as great a threat as spooky technology.