This Machine Kills Secrets

The book I read to research this post was This Machine Kills Secrets which is one of the best books I have read connected to computing and which I bought from a local bookstore. This book is about the emergence of websites like Wikileaks and how hackers and cypherpunks have released lots of secret information into the public domain. Even the Russian Mafia haven’t been safe from these disclosures which have been on a worldwide scale. Julian Assange one of the founders of Wikileaks is one of the best hackers in the world and prior to running that website which was at least partly responsible for the Arab Spring Revolutions and has apparently hacked many computers in his pursuit of secret information. A lot of what hackers do is mostly social engineering where they phone an organisation’s help desk and try to get them to disclose passwords and other information. Wikileaks for example released that the US State Department disliked the President of Tunisia and probably wouldn’t support him. For people in countries with totalitarian regimes visiting sites like Wikileaks is vital for them to know what is going on but risky as they can be taken away and tortured. The Tor browser was vital for these people as on most sites it hid your IP address and location and there are volunteers who contribute their IP address and locations to be used as a mask. Another important thing was the release as open source of PGP or pretty good privacy which allowed files to be encrypted in a way that was mostly secure. Another protocol worked by having a kind of false layer where you could give an alternate key and there would appear an apparently innocent designed to fool interrogators in totalitarian regimes who might torture someone for the key to his encryption. I really enjoyed reading this book which also looks at the problems faced by websites like Wikileaks like companies like the Bank of America & Paypal refusing to process donations being sent to them effectively cutting off most of their funding. Also some people who passed on information to Wikileaks have been prosecuted for various reasons or are awaiting trial. Wikileaks itself was hacked and all it’s files were placed on Pirate Bay a file sharing site in a downloadable form because someone failed to use a secure enough password.