Ursula K. LeGuin:

We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable -- but then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words.

Brendan Nyhan:

[That's] the problem with rumors -- they're often much more interesting than the truth. The challenge for fact-checkers, it seems, is to make the facts as fun to share as the myths they seek to replace.

David Jakubowski, Facebook's head of advertising technology:

We are bringing all of the people-based marketing functions that marketers are used to doing on Facebook and allowing them to do that across the web.

David Brooks:

Data-driven politics assumes that demography is destiny, that the electorate is not best seen as a group of free-thinking citizens but as a collection of demographic slices. This method assumes that mobilization is more important than persuasion; that it is more important to target your likely supporters than to try to reframe debates or persuade the whole country.

Decius:

It's important to understand that it isn't Congress that must change -- it is us.

Lawrence D. Freedman:

In the end, the lesson of 1914 is that there are no sure lessons. Yet there are always choices, and the best advice for governments to emerge from the story of 1914 is to make them carefully: be clear about core interests, get the best possible information, explore opportunities for a peaceful settlement, and treat military plans with skepticism.

Randall Munroe:

Is there an app for that?

Ian Urbuna:

Observers disturb the things we measure.

Michael Glennon:

The government is seen increasingly by elements of the public as hiding what they ought to know, criminalizing what they ought to be able to do, and spying upon what ought to be private. The people are seen increasingly by the government as unable to comprehend the gravity of security threats.

Jordan Michael Smith:

In a new book, "National Security and Double Government," Michael Glennon catalogs the ways that the defense and national security apparatus is effectively self-governing, with virtually no accountability, transparency, or checks and balances of any kind. He uses the term "double government": There's the one we elect, and then there's the one behind it, steering huge swaths of policy almost unchecked. Elected officials end up serving as mere cover for the real decisions made by the bureaucracy.

National security policy actually bubbles up from within the bureaucracy.

The ultimate problem is the pervasive political ignorance on the part of the American people.

The people have to take the bull by the horns. And that's a very difficult thing to do, because the ignorance is in many ways rational. There is very little profit to be had in learning about, and being active about, problems that you can't affect, policies that you can't change.

Dougald Hine:

Switch off the infinity machine, not forever, nor because there is anything bad about it, but out of recognition of our own finitude: there is only so much information any of us can bear, and we cannot go fishing in the stream if we are drowning in it.

Ian Leslie:

The gap between question and answer is where creativity thrives and scientific progress is made. When we celebrate our greatest thinkers, we usually focus on their ingenious answers. But the thinkers themselves tend to see it the other way around. "Looking back," said Charles Darwin, "I think it was more difficult to see what the problems were than to solve them." The writer Anton Chekhov declared, "The role of the artist is to ask questions, not answer them." The very definition of a bad work of art is one that insists on telling its audience the answers, and a scientist who believes she has all the answers is not a scientist.

In a world awash in ready-made answers, the ability to pose difficult, even unanswerable questions is more important than ever.

Dan Saffer:

You future-proof yourself by ensuring that the kind of work you do cannot be easily replicated by an algorithm. In design, those skills are insights-gathering, problem framing, and crafting unconventional solutions.

Knowing the context, and being able to determine what the true problem is to solve (and not just fixing a symptom) is a key part of the designer's role (as it is now). Fortunately, the current present abounds with great examples of startups solving non-problems for us to learn from.

Ambassador Sorin Ducaru, NATO Assistant Secretary General for Emerging Security Challenges:

The cyber threat is not just a potential threat, it is daily reality.

ADM Mike Rogers:

This is not theoretical.

Michael Hayden and Michael Mukasey:

The sponsors of the USA Freedom Act prefer the counsel of hypothetical fears to the logic of concrete realities.

Ian Urbuna:

Rachel Malis's father fled Ukraine in 1980 when he was 28, and he vowed never to return. Even in America, old habits, like his KGB-induced skepticism of the police lingered. Malis said that during her childhood in Trumbull, Conn., near New Haven, he would close the living-room blinds whenever he wanted to discuss anything "sensitive," like summer travel plans or family finances.

Tony Mendez:

1. Assume nothing.
2. Never go against your gut.
3. Everyone is potentially under opposition control.
4. Don't look back; you are never completely alone.
5. Go with the flow, blend in.
6. Vary your pattern and stay within your cover.
7. Lull them into a sense of complacency.
8. Don't harass the opposition.
9. Pick the time and place for action.
10. Keep your options open.

Iris Murdoch:

After a while I began to have an uneasy feeling of being observed. I am very sensitive to observation, and often have this feeling not only in the presence of human beings but in that of small animals.

Once I even traced the source of it to a large spider whose mysterious eyes were fixed upon me. In my experience the spider is the smallest creature whose gaze can be felt.

Benjamin Wallace-Wells:

Each of these [drones] gives its human operator the same power: It allows us to project our intelligence into the air and to exert our influence over vast expanses of space. It is this combination of inscrutability and remote power that makes them such a maddeningly seductive and destructive tool of foreign policy.

John Markoff:

During the past 15 years, video cameras have been placed in a vast number of public and private spaces. In the future, the software operating the cameras will not only be able to identify particular humans via facial recognition, experts say, but also identify certain types of behavior, perhaps even automatically alerting authorities.

James Bridle:

The core technology of the Third Wall, again pioneered but only partially implemented by the Second, is Automated Number Plate Recognition, or ANPR. When the Wall was initially constructed, the public were informed that this data would only be held, and regularly purged, by Transport for London, who oversee traffic matters in the city. However, within less than five years, the Home Secretary gave the Metropolitan Police full access to this system, which allowed them to take a complete copy of the data produced by the system.

This permission to access the data was granted to the Police on the sole condition that they only used it when National Security was under threat. But since the data was now in their possession, the Police reclassified it as "Crime" data and now use it for general policing matters, despite the wording of the original permission. As this data is not considered to be "personal data" within the definition of the law, the Police are under no obligation to destroy it, and may retain their ongoing record of all vehicle movements within the city for as long as they desire.

The Fourth London Wall will be made of transponders carried in the vehicles themselves. One of the defining characteristics of the Wall is that it is not, and cannot be, voluntary. Each successive Wall is only erected when the relevant technologies and social systems have arisen that no longer depend on consent.

London's citizens will dream, and the images of their dreams will dance on the telescreens of Piccadilly Circus, and be found wanting.

Francis Fukuyama:

The depressing bottom line is that given how self-reinforcing the country's political malaise is, and how unlikely the prospects for constructive incremental reform are, the decay of American politics will probably continue until some external shock comes along to catalyze a true reform coalition and galvanize it into action.

Washington Post editorial board:

In an era of fierce partisanship and close division, there will always be a temptation to postpone legislating until after the next election and to spend the intervening two years jockeying for political advantage. But a knockout blow will remain out of reach for both sides, and the price of postponement will be national decline.

Matt McKenna:

We live in a country in which Congress has an approval rating of barely 15% and yet 95% of incumbents are reelected. How can it be that voters continually elect the same people and parties they say are doing a terrible job?

Andrew Sullivan:

The leadership in both parties cannot help themselves when they have a big shiny military and see something they don't like happening in the world. When will Washington actually admit its catastrophic errors and crimes of the last decade -- and try to reform its own compulsive-interventionist habits to reflect reality rather than myth? Not yet, it appears, not yet. Washington cannot bear very much reality.

John Markoff:

Weapons that make their own decisions move so quickly that human overseers soon may not be able to keep up. Yet many of them are explicitly designed to permit human operators to step away from the controls.

Mike Loukides:

Intentions mean nothing when they're hidden behind a model that makes decisions for you.

Travis Nicholson, a graduate student at the JILA, a joint institute between NIST and CU-Boulder:

That's research grade tinfoil.

Claire Cain Miller:

Americans say they are deeply concerned about privacy on the web and their cellphones. They say they do not trust Internet companies or the government to protect it. Yet they keep using the services and handing over their personal information.

Pew:

Across the board, there is a universal lack of confidence among adults in the security of everyday communications channels -- particularly when it comes to the use of online tools. Across six different methods of mediated communication, there is not one mode through which a majority of the American public feels "very secure" when sharing private information with another trusted person or organization.

Beverly Gage:

The current F.B.I. director, James Comey, keeps a copy of the Martin Luther King wiretap request on his desk as a reminder of the bureau's capacity to do wrong. But elsewhere in Washington, the debate over how much the government should know about our private lives has never been more heated ... King's experience reminds us that these are far from idle fears, conjured in the fevered minds of civil libertarians. They are based in the hard facts of history.

Devlin Barrett:

The program cuts out phone companies as an intermediary in searching for suspects. Rather than asking a company for cell-tower information to help locate a suspect, which law enforcement has criticized as slow and inaccurate, the government can now get that information itself.

"What is done on U.S. soil is completely legal," said one person familiar with the program. "Whether it should be done is a separate question."

Nicholas Carr, in The Glass Cage:

"Resistance is futile," goes the glib Star Trek cliche beloved by techies. But that's the opposite of the truth. Resistance is never futile. If the source of our vitality is, as Emerson taught us, "the active soul," then our highest obligation is to resist any force, whether institutional or commercial or technological, that would enfeeble or enervate the soul.

Robert Freeman:

The IBM X-Force Research team has identified a significant data manipulation vulnerability (CVE-2014-6332) with a CVSS score of 9.3 in every version of Microsoft Windows from Windows 95 onward. Significant vulnerabilities can go undetected for some time. In this case, the buggy code is at least 19 years old and has been remotely exploitable for the past 18 years. I have no doubt that it would have fetched six figures on the gray market.

AP:

40 years and more than $100bn after the first federal data protection law was enacted, the government is struggling to close holes without the knowledge, staff or systems to outwit an ever-evolving foe. Although the government is projected to spend $65bn on cybersecurity contracts between 2015 and 2020, many experts believe the effort is not enough to counter a growing pool of hackers whose motives vary.

Mary Pat Flaherty, Jason Samenow and Lisa Rein:

Hackers from China breached the federal weather network recently, forcing cybersecurity teams to seal off data vital to disaster planning, aviation, shipping and scores of other crucial uses, officials said.

The intrusion occurred in late September but officials gave no indication that they had a problem until Oct. 20, according to three people familiar with the hack and the subsequent reaction by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration or NOAA, which includes the National Weather Service. Even then, NOAA did not say its systems were compromised.

Ellen Nakashima:

Chinese government hackers are suspected of breaching the computer networks of the United States Postal Service, compromising the data of more than 800,000 employees — including the postmaster general's.

The compromised data included names, dates of birth, Social Security numbers, addresses, dates of employment and other information, officials said. The data of every employee were exposed.

David A. Wheeler:

The biggest issue, as always, is those systems which are not rapidly updated. Indeed, many systems have no reasonable update process at all!

Jerry Michalski, a former tech industry analyst and founder of the REX think tank, observed in a recent Pew study:

Most of the devices exposed on the internet will be vulnerable. They will also be prone to unintended consequences: they will do things nobody designed for beforehand, most of which will be undesirable.

Tim Parks:

"Into thirty centuries born," Edwin Muir began his most celebrated poem, "At home in them all but the very last." Much is said about escapism in narrative and fiction. But perhaps the greatest escapism of all is to take refuge in the domesticity of the past, the home that history and literature become, avoiding the one moment of time in which we are not at home, yet have to live: the present.

This is the place of hope and fear, And faith that comes when hope is lost; Defeat and victory both are here. In this place where all's to be.

Decius:

I've gotten old enough that I now understand why adults seek to escape reality. Paradoxically, I think I was better at escaping reality when I was younger.

Andrew O'Hagan:

We sat in the past and burned with the desire to get out, to meet people, to find our voices, to discover the true meaning of luxury in our confrontation with a panoply of genuine choices. Our wish wasn't to plant a flag on the ground of what we knew and defend it until death, but to sail out, not quite knowing what was past the horizon but hoping we might like it when we got there.

Sterling Hayden:

To be truly challenging, a voyage, like a life, must rest on a firm foundation of financial unrest. If you are contemplating a voyage and you have the means, abandon the venture until your fortunes change. Only then will you know what the sea is all about.

Shaila Dewan:

It is difficult to tell how much has been seized by state and local law enforcement, but under a Justice Department program, the value of assets seized has ballooned to $4.3 billion in the 2012 fiscal year from $407 million in 2001.

Danah Boyd:

People don't think about the incentive structures of policing, especially in communities where the law is expected to clear so many warrants and do so many arrests per month. When they're stationed in algorithmically determined "high risk" communities, they arrest in those communities, thereby reinforcing the algorithms' assumptions.

Patrick Radden Keefe:

The plan was to arrest low-level soldiers, threaten them with lengthy jail terms, and then flip them, gathering information that could lead to arrests farther up the criminal hierarchy.

Alistair Croll:

The better we are at predicting the future, the less we'll be willing to share our fates with others. And the more those predictions look like facts, the more justice looks like thoughtcrime.

James Comey:

My goal is to urge our fellow citizens to participate in a conversation as a country about where we are, and where we want to be, with respect to the authority of law enforcement.