CCTV is seen either as a symbol of Orwellian dystopia or a technology that will lead to crime-free streets and civil behaviour. While arguments continue, there is very little solid data in the public domain about the costs, quantity and effectiveness of surveillance.
— Heather Brooke
For information to be useful, it should be dynamic, searchable, and accessible.
When it comes to reforming MPs' expenses, the answer is simply to keep it simple: show us receipts as they're claimed and, where there are abuses, enforce the law.
Leaks are not the problem; they are the symptom. They reveal a disconnect between what people want and need to know and what they actually do know. The greater the secrecy, the more likely a leak.
The royal family are protected from public accountability by law.
Many of us are under the delusion that the police exist solely to deal with crime and keep us safe. That is to ignore the major focus of many of today's top cops on managing reputation - both of their force and, by default, their careers.
Hackers often describe what they do as playfully creative problem solving.
Unwarranted search and seizure by the government officials was unacceptable to the American revolutionaries. Shouldn't it be unacceptable in the digital age, too?
A generation of people are being radicalised by the criminalisation of information sharing.
In the soil of ignorance, fear can easily be sown.
There is risk everywhere. Being alive carries the risk of death.
I'm a freedom of information campaigner, so obviously I support the cause of Wikileaks.
Our printing press is the Internet. Our coffee houses are social networks.
Traditional publishers require an author to submit a manuscript six months in advance, and if pressed, no later than two or three.
I'm very optimistic, but I'm optimistic about individuals, not institutions.
Politicians often claim secrecy is necessary for good governance or national security.
I pine for a return to the type of old-school journalism and the tough newspapermen and women of the Thirties.
Say what you will about Americans, but one thing they are not is passive. The Bush administration may have pushed through the Patriot Act weeks after 11 September, but, as the American public got to grips with how the law was affecting their individual rights, their protests grew loud and angry.
Secrecy can be sexy. It's essential to any good mystery novel.
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.
It used to cost money to disclose and distribute information. In the digital age it costs money not to.
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.
Democracy isn't just for people in the Middle East, but Britons, too.
The hacker community may be small, but it possesses the skills that are driving the global economies of the future.
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.
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.
In whose interest is it to hype up the collapse of the Internet from a DDoS attack? Why, the people who provide cyber security services, of course.
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.
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.
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.
The speed with which WikiLeaks went from niche interest to global prominence was a real-time example of the revolutionizing power of the digital age in which information can spread instantly across the globe through networked individuals.
When I was 26 or 27, I gave up journalism. I came to England after my mom died, to let serendipity take its course. And I just found myself back in journalism again.
Parliamentarians certainly know how to do bad public relations.
There's a temptation not to vote at all as a protest, but it's definitely not a protest. In fact, all it does is keep the people in power in power, and I don't think they should be.
It seems appropriate that the author of '1984' was a British citizen. George Orwell must have seen how easily the great British public's lamb-like disposition toward its leaders could be exploited to create a police state.
You don't make a system more effective by increasing the number of regulators.
The monarchy is a part of the state. It exists to serve the people.
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.
Public relations is at best promotion or manipulation, at worst evasion and outright deception. What it is never about is a free flow of information.
If Anonymous and Lulzsec are the id of hacking, then physical hackerspaces are the heart of the higher-minded hacking ideals: freedom of information, meritocracy of ideas, a joy of learning and anti-authoritarianism.
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.
We pay a lot for our court service, but it's not enough. Courts are under-resourced, which leads to delayed justice - particularly in criminal courts.
A lack of government oversight hasn't hindered the Internet. Quite the opposite. A hands-off approach is largely responsible for its fantastic growth and success.
A lot of people have a lot to gain from peddling scare stories about cyber 'warfare.'
The movement towards radical transparency and accountability has been gaining steam for several decades.
In America, you have the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act. You've got drones now being considered for domestic surveillance. You have the National Security Agency building the world's giantest spy center.
Digitization is certainly challenging the old ways of doing things, whether that's in publishing or politics. But it's not the end. In many ways, it is just the beginning.
As the news agenda goes into warp speed, it becomes ever more difficult for authors writing about current events to keep their books timely and relevant.
Britain's legal structure is basically the same as in feudal times: laws are written for the elite.
My parents are British but they emigrated to America, where I was born.
