Barton Gellman

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

"At Cheney's initiative, the United States stripped terror suspects of long-established rights under domestic and international law, building a new legal edifice under exclusive White House ownership."

"Daniel Ellsberg showed tremendous courage back in the '70s."

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

"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."

"Experts said public companies worry about the loss of customer confidence and the legal liability to shareholders or security vendors when they report flaws."

"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."

"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."

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

"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."

"Most computers today have built in backup software."

"Smallpox, which spreads by respiration and kills roughly one in three of those infected, took hundreds of millions of lives during a recorded history dating to Pharaonic Egypt. The last case was in 1978, and the disease was declared eradicated on May 8, 1980."

"The National Security Agency has broken privacy rules or overstepped its legal authority thousands of times each year since Congress granted the agency broad new powers in 2008, according to an internal audit and other top-secret documents."

"The NSA has different reporting requirements for each branch of government and each of its legal authorities."