Joe Biden:

I believe the huge sums of unlimited and often secret money pouring into our politics is a fundamental threat to our democracy. And I really mean that. I think it's a fundamental threat.

Larry Lessig:

America gave birth to the idea of a representative democracy. We don't have one now. And all the promises about what the next Democratic administration will do don't mean squat diddly if we don't fix that fact. Now.

America needs a President who will do that. None of the other candidates in the Democratic primary have made this reform their priority. I am running for president. I am running with the purpose of restoring this democracy.

Elizabeth Drew:

The Implacables are less interested in legislating than in making a statement. To them, the rhetorical meat thrown out at election time to appease the angry masses -- which they've done their bit to stir up -- is invaluable as an organizing and fundraising mechanism. Thus there's now a circular system in which a large portion of the public, encouraged by opportunists and cynics as well as some true believers to get "mad as hell" votes for people who promise to go to Washington and not compromise. This, in turn, leads to paralysis and further anger on the part of the public that "nothing gets done in Washington."

Decius:

We're still our own greatest threat.

Blake Ross:

Doubt the media. Always doubt the media.

Ursula K. Le Guin:

Most publishers have very few qualms. And corporate publishers these days have no qualms -- they don't know what a qualm is. They wouldn't know it if it hit them in the face.

Bo Olson:

Nearly every person I worked with, I saw cry at their desk.

Jay Carney:

Here's what the story didn't tell you about Mr. Olson: his brief tenure at Amazon ended after an investigation revealed he had attempted to defraud vendors and conceal it by falsifying business records. When confronted with the evidence, he admitted it and resigned immediately.

The next time you see a sensationalistic quote in the Times like "nearly every person I worked with, I saw cry at their desk", you might wonder whether there's a crucial piece of context or backstory missing  --  like admission of fraud -- and whether the Times somehow decided it just wasn't important to check.

Dean Baquet:

[Bo Olson's] one quote in the story was consistent with those of other current and former employees. Several other people in other divisions also described people crying publicly in very similar terms.

Gwynn Guilford:

If Chinese hackers were rummaging around WHOI, what would they have been looking for?

Kevin Wolf, assistant secretary at the Commerce Department:

We have no idea what we are going to do.

Mark Foulon, Former Undersecretary of Commerce:

It has become clear that Internet access in itself is a vulnerability that we cannot mitigate. We have tried incremental steps and they have proven insufficient.

Krysia Lenzo:

The budget to support the US government's cybersecurity efforts is $14 billion for fiscal 2016, about 10 percent more than the $12.5 billion the government budgeted for 2015. Despite this increased spending, the US is still vulnerable to attack.

Nicole Perlroth:

In 2014, American venture capitalists poured $1.77 billion, a record amount, into private security start-ups, topping the previous record of $1.62 billion invested in 2000, at the height of the dot-com bubble, according to Dow Jones VentureSource.

Adrian Cockroft:

[Within five years] it will be impossible to get security certification if you're not running in the cloud ...

Daniel Thomas, Alastair Beresford, and Andrew Rice:

The market for Android security today is like the market for lemons. There is information asymmetry between the manufacturer, who knows whether the device is currently secure and will receive security updates, and the customer, who does not.

John Lambert:

When you say the word 'wormable' to a crisis manager, it activates some latent response DNA.

Philip Guenther:

In case you need an OpenSSL anecdote to scare your co-workers with ...

Lynn Parramore:

It's a good time to be in a fear-based industry.

Raphael Satter:

Hacking impudent opponents doesn't come cheap.

Alex Stamos:

Starting today, we will notify you if we believe your account has been targeted or compromised by an attacker suspected of working on behalf of a nation-state. To protect the integrity of our methods and processes, we often won't be able to explain how we attribute certain attacks to suspected attackers. That said, we plan to use this warning only in situations where the evidence strongly supports our conclusion.

Martin Filler:

Of the 620,000 men who lost their lives in the Civil War, two thirds succumbed to illness ...

Peter Beinart:

Almost one-third of those who served in Iraq and Afghanistan have been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder.

Arash Massoudi, Scheherazade Daneshkhu, Josh Noble, and James Fontanella-Khan:

The combination [of SABMiller and AB InBev] would create a brewer responsible for one in every three beers sold globally.

Mark Bowden:

It's not often that the most distinguished journalistic institution in America wades so fully into the crackpot world of Internet theorizing, where all information, no matter its source, is weightless and equal.

Kathryn Schulz:

Perhaps you would care to join me for a while in the land of complete cretinoid.

"No, totally!"

Blake Ross:

Doubt the media. Always doubt the media.

Educate yourself until alarm bells ring in your mind when you read observation masquerading as journalism. We are lucky to live in a time when we are all so empowered.

Decius:

I'm confident that technology has improved the resources available to people if/when they choose to act. So far they don't need to, largely. Don't wish for times when they do.

Martin Filler:

In 1900 there were some two hundred horse-related deaths in New York City.

Bill Gates:

People think, Oh, well, I'll just get an electric car. There are places where if you buy an electric car, you're actually increasing CO2 emissions, because the electricity infrastructure is emitting more CO2 than you would have if you'd had a gasoline-powered car.

Pete Warden:

A Microsoft paper showed that over 50% of the power on several popular games is consumed by the ads they show!

Jaron Lanier:

If you love a medium made of software, there's a danger that you will become entrapped in someone else's recent careless thoughts. Struggle against that!

Jonathan Franzen:

Jaron Lanier, who bears the stodgy weight of being a Microsoft guy ...

The Economist:

You can't throw a ball in a Stockholm park without hitting a bearded man pushing a pram.

AFP:

A club of bearded men posing for a photograph in the Swedish countryside with their black flag was mistaken for Islamic State militants, prompting a visit by the police, a club member has said.

Simon Critchley:

We always have to acknowledge that we might be mistaken.

When we forget that, then we forget ourselves and the worst can happen.

Richard Bejtlich:

Will China expect the United States to arrest American hackers?

Howard Schmidt:

What we can do, we can expect done back to us.

Vincent Strubel:

Everything you can do through the voice interface you can do remotely and discreetly through electromagnetic waves.

William Finnegan:

Waves are not stationary objects in nature like roses or diamonds. [They are, instead, at once] the object of your deepest desire and adoration [but also] your adversary, your nemesis, even your mortal enemy. [Riding them is] the theoretical solution to an impossibly complex problem.

Leo Kelion:

Worldpay, one of the biggest payments processing companies, has revealed it is developing a chip-and-pin terminal that includes facial recognition technology.

The prototype -- dubbed a Pin Entry Device Camera (PED cam) -- features an upward-facing image sensor.

The firm says it would store the captured images in a "secure" central database.

Threat Assessment:

Lisa: Uh, are you sure that's safe?
Kearny: Well it ain't gettin' any safer.

Maciej Ceglowski:

Data collection is a trade-off. It hurts the people whose data you collect, but it also hurts your ability to think clearly. Make sure that it's worth it!

James Fontanella-Khan and Richard Waters:

Dell is in talks with banks to line up $40bn in financing for an acquisition of storage company EMC, according to people familiar the matter, marking what could become the tech industry's biggest-ever acquisition.

A deal would mark the most significant realignment yet seen in the IT sector as traditional hardware companies reposition themselves for the cloud era.

Maciej Ceglowski:

No one knows what will become of sites like Twitter in five years or ten. But the data those sites own will retain the power to hurt for decades.

The promise is that enough data will give you insight. Retain data indefinitely, maybe waterboard it a little, and it will spill all its secrets.

I hope to make you believe data collection is a trade-off. It hurts the people whose data you collect, but it also hurts your ability to think clearly. Make sure that it's worth it!

Jaron Lanier:

If you love a medium made of software, there's a danger that you will become entrapped in someone else's recent careless thoughts. Struggle against that!