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This machine kills secrets
384 pages
A gripping, shadowy dive into the minds and code of the radical hackers who declared war on institutional secrecy.
What it feels like
Reading this book feels like slipping into the digital underground, guided by a deeply knowledgeable insider. It moves with a brisk, investigative energy, balancing the high-stakes tension of a spy thriller with the intellectual rigor of a tech history. The mood is inherently shadowy and slightly paranoid, reflecting the cypherpunk ethos it explores. Greenberg's prose is sharp and accessible, effortlessly translating complex cryptographic concepts into a propulsive narrative about radical idealism and anti-establishment rebellion. You are pulled into a world of brilliant, sometimes volatile characters who wield code as a weapon. It will thoroughly delight tech enthusiasts, privacy advocates, and anyone fascinated by the invisible digital wars reshaping global power and transparency.
- Mood
- shadowy
- paranoid
- intellectually stimulating
- tense
- Tone
- investigative
- urgent
- objective
- fascinated
- authoritative
- Pace
- brisk
- Themes
- tension between privacy and transparency · radical idealism · the power of code · anti-establishment rebellion · evolution of digital activism
- The writing
- Clear, journalistic, and accessible, translating complex cryptographic concepts into a gripping narrative.
- The arc
- Moves from historical curiosity to a tense, high-stakes realization of how digital transparency is reshaping global power.
- Who it's for
- Tech enthusiasts, privacy advocates, and fans of narrative nonfiction who want to understand the underground forces shaping the modern internet.
Content notes
- government surveillance
- political persecution
- legal jeopardy
About the book
Who Are The Cypherpunks?
This is the unauthorized telling of the revolutionary cryptography story behind the motion picture The Fifth Estate in theatres this October, and We Steal Secrets: The Story of Wikileaks, a documentary out now.
WikiLeaks brought to light a new form of whistleblowing, using powerful cryptographic code to hide leakers’ identities while they spill the private data of government agencies and corporations. But that technology has been evolving for decades in the hands of hackers and radical activists, from the libertarian enclaves of Northern California to Berlin to the Balkans. And the secret-killing machine continues to evolve beyond WikiLeaks, as a movement of hacktivists aims to obliterate the world’s institutional secrecy.
Forbes journalist Andy Greenberg has traced its shadowy history from the cryptography revolution of the 1970s to Wikileaks founding hacker Julian Assange, Anonymous, and beyond.
This is the story of the code and the characters—idealists, anarchists, extremists—who are transforming the next generation’s notion of what activism can be.
With unrivaled access to such major players as Julian Assange, Daniel Domscheit-Berg, and WikiLeaks’ shadowy engineer known as the Architect, never before interviewed, Greenberg unveils the world of politically-motivated hackers—who they are and how they operate.
Description from Open Library.
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