Dan Froomkin:

Why was Mitch McConnell fighting so hard to extend the Patriot Act as is?

Maybe because if the hardliners gave up without a fight, it wouldn't look like the reformers had prevailed.

Joel Brenner:

Of course the dough of outrage rose higher and higher when leavened with the yeast of hypocrisy.

Mark Buchanan:

Sure it looks as if things are getting more peaceful. But, looking at the mathematics, that's exactly what we should expect to see, even if we're most likely due for a much more violent future.

Pamela Cobb:

It's estimated that 80 percent of cyberattacks are driven by crime rings -- that has put digital crime on the map as one of the largest illegal economies in the world, with global profits reaching $445 billion annually.

Brian Krebs:

Consumers who re-use passwords for sites holding their payment data are asking for trouble, and will get it eventually.

Brendan Hannigan:

Just this month, a series of cyberthefts at more than 100 banks in 30 countries resulted in the loss of $1 billion.

John Kerry:

Every country should mitigate malicious cyber activity emanating from its soil, and they should do so in a transparent, accountable and cooperative way.

David Koh, chief executive, Cyber Security Agency of Singapore:

Cyber security is a critical issue in an increasingly borderless world and we look forward to working alongside France to better prevent and respond to evolving cyber threats.

Kevin Bankston:

It's time for America to lead the world toward a more secure future rather than a digital ecosystem riddled with vulnerabilities of our own making.

David Cameron:

For too long, we have been a passively tolerant society, saying to our citizens: as long as you obey the law, we will leave you alone ... This government will conclusively turn the page on this failed approach.

Chuck Canterbury, the national president of the Fraternal Order of Police:

The fact is, a riot can happen in any city in America.

Douglasville Deputy Chief Gary E. Sparks:

It's better to have it and not need it than need it and not have it.

Former FBI assistant director Thomas Fuentes:

Keep Fear Alive. Keep it alive.

Bug bounty program rules:

The researcher submitting the bug must not be the author of the vulnerable code.

Jose Pagliery:

To scare potential clients, Tiversa would typically make up fake data breaches, Richard Wallace said. Then it pressured firms to pay up.

Jeff Atwood:

A ransomware culture ... does not feel very far off ...

danah boyd:

I feel like I am at constant war with my own brain over the dynamics of fear.

EFF:

They say you shouldn't be allowed to repair your own car because you might not do it right.

Guy Haselmann:

Pricing these heightened [cyber] risks into markets is impossible. 'Event risk' always exists, but handicapping it appropriately is a futile exercise.

Ryan Schlunz:

Ask the person in charge of technology security at your firm if your systems were breached the previous night. Then ask them to prove it to you. Do this daily until you get better answers.

Peter-Paul Koch:

Tools don't solve problems any more, they have become the problem.

Mike Elgan:

State-sponsored cyber-war is here to stay.

Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai:

Sen. Charles "Chuck" Grassley (R-Iowa), sent a letter with a list of detailed questions to the Department of Justice on Wednesday, roughly two weeks after Motherboard revealed that the DEA had signed a contract in 2012 for $2.4 million worth of spyware from Hacking Team. Grassley's letter could potentially be the beginning of a more in-depth investigation into the use of malware by law enforcement in the United States.

Tim Starks:

Senate Armed Services Chairman John McCain (R-Ariz.), is among those contemplating taking action; he is weighing an amendment to the annual defense policy bill that would spell out what the Defense Department's cyber offensive and defensive capabilities should be.

Bruce Schneier:

I'm ... worried ... about a multination cyber arms race that stockpiles capabilities ... and prioritizes attack over defense in an effort to gain relative advantage.

Brandon Valeriano and Ryan C. Maness:

In both [terrorism and cyber attacks], fear is the result of imagined consequences. Terrorism has given birth to an industry built to combat threats, and a similar process is now under way with regard to cyberattacks. The general response to terrorism has been counterproductive and damaging, lending itself to hyperbole and overreaction. It is troubling to see the same path repeated with cyberwarfare, as an industry has sprung up within the private sector and military to meet the threat.

Paul Goodman:

As a professional in a community of learned professionals, a technologist must have a different kind of training and develop a different character than we see at present among technicians and engineers.

Steven Bellovin:

We don't even have the right words.

Freeman Dyson:

The purpose of thinking about the future is not to predict it but to raise people's hopes.

Arthur L. Costa:

The future is not some place we are going to but one we are creating.

Frank Rich:

The point of the warnings is not to save lives so much as political hides.

Robert C. Merton:

The question to ask is not, Are we safer? The question to ask is, Are we better off?

Freeman Dyson:

Amnesty is not easy and not fair, but it is a moral necessity.

Tony Dokoupil:

The Internet is not "just" another delivery system.

Bill Marczak:

The Great Cannon is not simply an extension of the Great Firewall.

William Whyte:

The fault is not in organization, in short; it is in our worship of it.

Lauren Smiley:

Outside my building there's always a phalanx of befuddled delivery guys who seem relieved when you walk out, so they can get in. Inside, the place is stuffed with the goodies they bring: Amazon Prime boxes sitting outside doors, evidence of the tangible, quotidian needs that are being serviced by the web. The humans who live there, though, I mostly never see. And even when I do, there seems to be a tacit agreement among residents to not talk to one another. I floated a few "hi's" in the elevator when I first moved in, but in return I got the monosyllabic, no-eye-contact mumble. It was clear: Lady, this is not that kind of building.

Liliana Segura:

The truth is, yes, even "hello" can feel like an unwelcome demand.

Jesse Hicks:

Wherever there's a system, an established order, someone will have an incentive to uphold it. And someone else will have equal incentive to break it.

Elizabeth Dunn And Michael Norton:

Simply acknowledging strangers on the street may alleviate their existential angst; and being acknowledged by others might do the same for us.

When we walk down the street, we can refuse to accept a world where people look at one another as though through air. When we talk to strangers, we stand to gain much more than the "me time" we might lose.

Andrew Bosworth:

Being kind turns out to be a long term strategy for maximizing impact.

Paul Graham:

Don't just not be evil. Be good.

Nathan Freed Wessler, a Staff Attorney with ACLU's Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project:

The border is not a constitution-free zone.

NYT Editorial Board:

The Constitution is not Candy Crush.

Mark Rasch:

If you're looking everywhere for spies, you will find spies everywhere, even where they don't exist.

Paul Goodman:

As a moral philosopher, a technician should be able to criticize the programs given him to implement.

David Cole:

As a result of the digital revolution and the third-party doctrine, the face of privacy has changed, and it will continue to change dramatically. Unless we respond appropriately, we are in danger of seeing privacy go the way of the eight-track player. And that has immense consequences not only for our personal lives, but for the character of our country.

danah boyd:

There was something about how our society socialized parents into parenting that produced the culture of fear.

Former FBI assistant director Thomas Fuentes:

You know, it's my opposite of Jesse Jackson's 'Keep Hope Alive' -- it's 'Keep Fear Alive.' Keep it alive.

Douglasville Deputy Chief Gary E. Sparks:

It's better to have it and not need it than need it and not have it.

Michael McCaul, the Republican chair of the House homeland security committee:

Terrorism has gone viral.

Jason Healey, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council's Cyber Statecraft Initiative:

[This is] the most dangerous cyber moment that I can remember [in two decades].

James Comey:

The Internet is the most dangerous parking lot imaginable.

Stan Stahl, president of of the Los Angeles chapter of the Information Systems Security Association:

It's staggering, the number of people who will click on a link to get the free Amazon gift card. It's kind of scary.

Former FBI assistant director Thomas Fuentes:

You know, it's my opposite of Jesse Jackson's 'Keep Hope Alive' -- it's 'Keep Fear Alive.' Keep it alive.

Iain Thomson:

Advanced Threat Analytics constantly scrutinizes your office network, and uses basic machine learning techniques to identify suspicious behavior by devices and users, and raise the alarm if necessary.

Barack Obama:

I ... hereby declare a national emergency ...

Ben Thompson:

Wouldn't it be better if we never got to the moment of crisis at all?

Decius:

I think many Americans feel a sense of entitlement to the greatness of America. They wrap up our country's accomplishments, sprinkle on a bunch of stuff we didn't accomplish, pin it on their chest, and claim personal responsibility for it. They believe that they are personally great because they are Americans and America is great.

Steve Jobs:

Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life.

The Economist:

America's preeminence is over.

Kai Wright:

If you grow up a poor child, you are very likely to be a poor adult. And today, four out of 10 black children live in poverty -- roughly double the national rate.

Rafil Kroll-Zaidi:

Among African-American men aged fifteen to forty-four, 88.7 percent of gun deaths are homicides; among white American men aged thirty-five to sixty-four, 89.2 percent of gun deaths are suicides.

Francis Fukuyama:

One of the most sobering graphs in Our Kids shows that while the proportion of young children from college-educated backgrounds living in single-parent families has declined to well under 10 per cent, the number has risen steadily for the working class and now stands at close to 70 per cent.

Lawrence Lessig:

We still have the power to fix our democracy.

We will, if you help.

Alice Zheng:

In some ways, all of us in this field are imposters. No one knows everything. The only way to progress is to dive in and start doing. Let us not measure ourselves against others, or focus on how much we don't yet know.

From Mallory Ortberg's "Every Question in Every Q&A Session Ever":

I noticed there are some things you haven't done in your career. Can you explain why you haven't done them, even though I consider them to be more important than the things you personally prefer to do?

Cheryl Strayed:

Don't quit just because you're miserable. Remember, something is to be gained from suffering.

Hofstadter's Law:

It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law.

David Z. Hambrick:

Competitive SCRABBLE players devoted an average of nearly 5 hours a week to memorizing words from the SCRABBLE dictionary.

David Brooks:

The only way to stay fully alive is to dive down to your obsessions six fathoms deep.

Jason Lengstorf:

The insidious thing about the Overkill Cult is that it masquerades as all the things we like most about ourselves: dedication, ambition, follow-through, responsibility. It tells us to push harder, stay later, sleep when we're dead. It tells us we're never going to get ahead if we don't show up first and go home last.

Roberto A. Ferdman:

Other people, as it turns out, actually aren't thinking about us quite as judgmentally or intensely as we tend to anticipate. Not nearly, in fact. There's a long line of research that shows how consistently and regularly we overestimate others' interest in our affairs.

Julie Cullivan, global chief information officer at FireEye:

A lot of times people assume you need to have a very technical background to be able to jump into security roles. But really it's about having an analytical mind, being able to correlate information and spot patterns.

Ashiq JA:

The real challenge is translating complex, technical cyber data into practical information that can be easily understood by the business as well as security pros.

Steven Bellovin:

We don't even have the right words.

Dara Lind:

There is half as much crime in the US right now as there was about 25 years ago.

John Perry Barlow:

Like the Union Pacific Railroad awaiting the fact of empire, they prefer to let the rag-tag pioneers die all over the frontier before they come out to claim it.

Disputes appeared like toadstools in the rich new soil of cyberspace.

Josh Pauli:

We're trying to bake it in early ...

Jason Chaffetz:

I worry about unintentional vulnerabilities.

Ashiq JA:

Lack of security controls in a modern information system which eventually increases the likelihood of a cyber risk or a data breach can be termed as a cyber mess.

John Carlin:

The bad guy is not the company that has been breached.

Fran Howarth:

Even though large financial institutions spend vast amounts of money on information security, there can still be gaps.

Robert Graham:

[The cyber sanctions regime is] unlikely to solve the problem of foreign hacking, but will do much to expand the cyber police state.

The Economist:

Doing something in principle and doing it in fact are not remotely the same thing.

Anand Giridharadas:

Picking winners also means picking -- and spurning -- losers.

AFP:

Only 32 percent of those surveyed in the CSA poll for the Atlantico news website said they were opposed to freedoms being reduced ...

Guy Haselmann:

Cyber-activity is the new 'cold war'.

Olga Razumovskaya:

According to the text of the agreement posted on the Russian government's website on Wednesday, Russia and China agree to not conduct cyber-attacks against each other, as well as jointly counteract technology that may "destabilize the internal political and socio-economic atmosphere," "disturb public order" or "interfere with the internal affairs of the state."

The two countries agreed to exchange information between law enforcement agencies, exchange technologies and ensure security of information infrastructure, the document says.