The hacker community may be small, but it possesses the skills that are driving the global economies of the future.
Heather Brooke
Our printing press is the Internet. Our coffee houses are social networks.
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.
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.
In Britain, it's bred into you, the idea that you can't really change anything, so why bother. When I went to school in America, it was the total opposite view - you, as an individual, can change anything and everything. It's how you're raised.
I pine for a return to the type of old-school journalism and the tough newspapermen and women of the Thirties.
The monarchy is a part of the state. It exists to serve the people.
Politicians often claim secrecy is necessary for good governance or national security.
For information to be useful, it should be dynamic, searchable, and accessible.
The way the Establishment deals with people like me is to ignore them. When you become unignorable, they will try to smear you, and that's what I feared for a long time. Now I have somehow vaulted into this space where it's difficult for someone to smear me because it would look as though they were being vindictive and spiteful.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Secrecy can be sexy. It's essential to any good mystery novel.
I'm a freedom of information campaigner, so obviously I support the cause of Wikileaks.
I never thought I would get married. I didn't think I was that type of person.
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.
The movement towards radical transparency and accountability has been gaining steam for several decades.
There's a lot of hand-wringing going on about the death of journalism and particularly the death of investigative journalism. What I see is that there is more need than ever to have experienced information processors - people who can look through this mass of data.
The biggest abuses in society happen when people are not able to communicate and not able to connect.
What the Internet has done is it has decentralised power.
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.
If you really believe in a cause, let the cause speak for itself. And if you, by your personality, are damaging that cause, if you really believe in it, you step aside.
What the interconnected age in which we live allows us to do is instantly connect with each other.
Democracy isn't just for people in the Middle East, but Britons, too.
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.
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.
There is risk everywhere. Being alive carries the risk of death.
Unwarranted search and seizure by the government officials was unacceptable to the American revolutionaries. Shouldn't it be unacceptable in the digital age, too?
My parents are British but they emigrated to America, where I was born.
It used to cost money to disclose and distribute information. In the digital age it costs money not to.
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.
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.
When you're a crime reporter, you see the nub of what life's about, and you don't have much patience for the falsity of politics.
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.
Whether I'll get the chance to write fiction, I don't know. I could do political conspiracy thrillers, couldn't I? With an investigative journalist as the heroine.
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.
I know people don't like America very much, but the one thing it's very good on is local government.
There's not a self-regulating group of nice fair-playing people in politics. There are a lot of dodgy people in politics.
If any of us were faced with a huge bag of free money and very little accountability, it would be human nature that you would make the most of it.
There is a very intense culture of secrecy in Britain that hasn't yet been dismantled. What passes for transparency here would serve any secret society well.
There are corporate private investigators, companies doing very forensic background checks on people. They buy data, they get their own data... They don't want their industry publicised.
People are used to getting a lot of information quickly, and they're used to being quite empowered as consumers, and they go to governments expecting a similar treatment; they want to find data and they want to influence events quickly, and yet they come into this brick wall.
The values of WikiLeaks have been completely overshadowed by Julian Assange.
It is scrutiny by the general public that keeps the powerful honest.
We are not naughty children, and the state is not our parent.
I like to write books and cause trouble.
Newspapers are not free and they never have been. They can appear to be so, but someone, somewhere is covering the costs whether that is through advertising, a patron's largesse or a license fee. Advertising is no longer subsidising the industry and so the cost must fall somewhere - why not on the people who use it?
I've written for 'The Times' because they have valued what I do enough to pay me. The 'New Statesman' magazine also asked me to write an article, but they didn't want to pay me anything. To me, that shows how much they value quality journalism.
