A biography for Barton Gellmanhasn’t been written yet.
“In late 2003, the Bush administration reversed a long-standing policy requiring agents to destroy their files on innocent American citizens, companies and residents when investigations closed.”
“Unsettling signs of al Qaeda's aims and skills in cyberspace have led some government experts to conclude that terrorists are at the threshold of using the Internet as a direct instrument of bloodshed.”
“It no longer counts as remarkable that Egyptians organized their uprising on social media.”
“The first time I set out to find George F. Kennan, in 1982, I had just turned 21, begun my final semester at Princeton University and noticed with astonishment that the senior thesis deadline had crept to within four months.”
“In the wealthy industrialized nations, effective drug therapies against AIDS became available - AZT as early as 1987, then combinations of antiretroviral agents in 1996. The new drugs offered hope that fatal complications might be staved off and AIDS rendered a chronic condition.”
“Rolf Ekeus, his appearance can deceive. He looks somewhere between an international diplomat and a mad professor. He's got that sort of shock of white hair and a slightly absent-minded way of speaking. But he's extremely sharp and very serious about power relationships.”
“I doubt there's any government in the world that guides itself primarily by strategy or conceptual documents or worldview. Anybody who has the reins of power has to look at practical limitations and tradeoffs - the fact that you can focus at most on one or two things at a time, that resources are limited.”
“Nothing is absolute in security.”
“Sudan expelled bin Laden on May 18, 1996, to Afghanistan.”
“For months, Obama administration officials attacked Snowden's motives and said the work of the NSA was distorted by selective leaks and misinterpretations.”
“Ghostery lets you spy on the spies in your computer. For each web page you visit, this extension uncloaks some - but not all - of the invisible tracking software that is working behind the scenes.”
“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.”
“Stuxnet, a computer worm reportedly developed by the United States and Israel that destroyed Iranian nuclear centrifuges in attacks in 2009 and 2010, is often cited as the most dramatic use of a cyber weapon.”
“One common puzzle for the security-minded is how to work with confidential data on the road. Sometimes you can't bring your laptop, or don't want to. But working on somebody else's machine exposes you to malware and leaves behind all kinds of electronic trails.”
“Cloud services cut both ways in terms of security: you get off-site backup and disaster recovery, but you entrust your secrets to somebody else's hands. Doing the latter increases your exposure to government surveillance and the potential for deliberate or inadvertent breaches of your confidential files.”
“Well-secured files don't do you much good if you lose them in a fire or hard drive crash.”
“Leaders at the top of al Qaeda's hierarchy, the evidence shows, completed plans and obtained the materials required to manufacture two biological toxins - botulinum and salmonella - and the chemical poison cyanide.”
“There is evidence that some of al Qaeda's nuclear efforts over the years met with swindles and false leads.”
“In general, states do not count on pledges of 'no more war' from their neighbors. Israel's army never counted on it from Egypt, for example.”