This Machine Kills Secrets

Young men and women who grew up in the digital age are expressing their dissatisfaction with governments, the military and corporations in a radically new way. They are building machines - writing cryptographic software codes - that are designed to protect the individual in a cloak of anonymity, while institutional secrets are uploaded for public consumption. This movement is shining a light on governments' classified documents and exposing abuses of power like never before. From Australia to Iceland - organisations like Wikileaks, Openleaks, and Anonymous are just some of the more familiar groups that are enabling whistleblowers and transforming the next generation's notion of what activism can be. The revolution won't be televised. It'll be online.Andy Greenberg, technology writer for Forbes magazine, has interviewed all the major players in this new era of activism including Julian Assange - and blows the cover of a key activist, previously only presumed to exist, named The Architect who accomplished for at least two leak sites exactly what his name implies. In This Machine Kills Secrets, Greenberg offers a vision of a world in which institutional secrecy no longer protects those in power - from big banks to dysfunctional governments. A world that digital technology has made all but inevitable.

Préface
A dramatic and compelling insight into the next digital revolution: the rise of hacktivisim and the end of privacy on the internet. Includes an exclusive interview with WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange

Auteur

Andy Greenberg

Résumé
A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLERThe unbelievable true story of the man who built a billion-dollar online drug empire from his bedroom and almost got away with it.In 2011, a twenty-six-year-old programmer named Ross Ulbricht launched the ultimate free market: the Silk Road, a clandestine Web site hosted on the Dark Web where anyone could trade anything drugs, hacking software, forged passports, counterfeit cash, poisons free of the government s watchful eye. While the federal government were undertaking an epic two-year manhunt for the site s elusive proprietor, the Silk Road quickly ballooned into a $1.2 billion enterprise.Ross embraced his new role as kingpin, taking drastic steps to protect himself including ordering a hit on a former employee. As Ross made plans to disappear forever, the Feds raced against the clock to catch a man they weren t sure even existed, searching for a needle in the haystack of the global Internet.Drawing on exclusive access to key players and two billion digital words and images Ross left behind, New York Times bestselling author Nick Bilton offers a tale filled with twists and turns, lucky breaks and unbelievable close calls. It s a story of the boy next door s ambition gone criminal, spurred on by the clash between the new world of libertarian-leaning, anonymous, decentralised Web advocates and the old world of government control, order and the rule of law.