Heather Brooke citations (61 citations, Page 2)

“Over the past year I've thought a lot about censorship, surveillance and regulation of the Internet. Is it necessary? Is it really so dangerous to allow individuals an ability to associate and communicate freely? Certainly there exists a criminal minority who take advantage of the freedom of the Internet, but no one is arguing that crimes shouldn't be prosecuted. This is about allowing the vast majority of people to communicate without state intervention. Despite all the dire warnings, the prophesies of doom and destruction that were foretold by the Pentagon, the US State Department, Hosni Mubarak, even English High Court Judge Eady, I look at the fallout from all that was published in 2010, all the breaches to establishment power that occurred through a networked citizenry- and the good clearly outweighs the bad. From the uprising in Iceland to the ousting of dictators in the Middle East, free speech has fundamentally changed the world for the good.”

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Heather Brooke

Page 236.
The Revolution Will Be Digitised: Dispatches From the Information War, 1st Edition

“This is the information war we are now engaged in. Governments are seeking to militarise cyberspace while citizens fight for the right to communicate and assemble freely online without state surveillance.”

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The Guardian http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2012/apr/20/we-should-all-be-hactivists "We should all be hacktivists now", Column in the Guardian, 20 April 2012.
Attributed, In the Media

“It is scrutiny by the general public that keeps the powerful honest.”

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The Independent http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/features/the-lives-of-others-heather-brookes-new-book-opens-up-further-fronts-in-the-war-to-set-information-free-1939295.html - "The lives of others: Heather Brooke's new book opens up further fronts in the war to set information free", 9 April 2010.
Attributed, In the Media

“Being a professional journalist is rather like training to be a lawyer. There's a certain amount you can learn in school but largely it is a vocation learned through practice, with scepticism being a primary attribute.”

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Heather Brooke

Page 70.
The Revolution Will Be Digitised: Dispatches From the Information War, 1st Edition

“If you believe the promise that an authoritarian state makes that if it has enough knowledge on every citizen it will keep people safe. I think that’s a false promise. It doesn’t actually happen. If that was the case then East Germany would be a really incredible place to live and in fact it wasn’t, it was really horrible, most of these places were really horrible.”

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Huffington Post http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2011/08/17/heather-brooke-data-deali_n_928985.html "Heather Brooke: Data Dealing Is A Bigger Scandal Than Phone Hacking", Interview with Dina Rickman, 17 August 2011.
Attributed, In the Media

“We now have a technology that unites individuals in such a way that we can create the first global democracy. Hundreds of millions of people are climbing out of poverty and the Internet gives them access to the sort of information that was previously accessible only to elite scholars. They can join a worldwide conversation and come together in infinite permutations to check power anywhere it concentrates. The greatest achievement isn't in producing technology, but using it to re-define the boundaries of what is possible.”

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Heather Brooke

Pages 238-239.
The Revolution Will Be Digitised: Dispatches From the Information War, 1st Edition

“The American government said: 'You can't publish this, it's dangerous, it's going to damage world affairs, diplomacy, etc, and then you publish it anyway and it's for the greater good, telling people what they needed to know.”

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Heather Brooke

Attributed, "We Steal Secrets" 2013 Movie

“The cost of making government more responsive to the people who fund it and in whose name it exists should not be attributed solely to FOI, but even if it is, surely that is a cost worth bearing? Making government transparent and accountable to the public directly increases the efficiency of the public sector more than any number of government regulators or watchdogs.”

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Heather Brooke

Page 5.
Your Right to Know: A Citizen's Guide to the Freedom of Information Act, 2nd Edition

“I’m very much a free market capitalist, actually. I don’t agree with a kind of totalitarian, one government or sort of universal law. I think what will happen and what is happening now is, in the same way as… In the way that countries make themselves attractive to investors through different pieces of legislation they offer, whether it’s secrecy in the case of the Cayman Islands or Switzerland, I think the fact that some countries now are offering very robust publishing laws, it will be that as information is global, what you might see is that these big internet companies like Google or Facebook, that have their servers, will start to relocate those servers to countries where they have less interference. In a way, you’re creating a kind of free market of freedom of information law.”

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Attributed, Chatham House Talk (September 28, 2011)

“This is where we get into the information war - that speculative blood became more important than the actual blood. We already can see all that terrible stuff – we know about that. Let's focus on your nightmares, how all these people might die because the government's secrets have been unleashed.”

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Attributed, "We Steal Secrets" 2013 Movie

“You should not expect politicians to promote freedom of information. Why should they? They have a vested interest in controlling the public's access to information and thereby maintaining their grip on power.”

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Heather Brooke

Page 285.
Your Right to Know: A Citizen's Guide to the Freedom of Information Act, 2nd Edition

“Authoritarians offer citizens a deal: if we hand over our freedom, they will guarantee certainty and safety. This might have been possible in a closed society with little interaction between people, but it is a false promise in a knowledge economy where citizens are interconnected. If the best chaos theorists can't model the weather beyond a week, how does the National Security Agency think it can predict which of us will turn into a terrorist? If our intelligence agencies persist in monopolising knowledge we will see continued intelligence failures.”

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Heather Brooke

Page 236.
The Revolution Will Be Digitised: Dispatches From the Information War, 1st Edition

“The survival of journalism in the digital age rests on its unique selling point: serving this public interest. Fail or forget to do that, and it has no future.”

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Heather Brooke

Press Gazette http://www.pressgazette.co.uk/wire/8235 - "Harold Evans, Guido Fawkes, Heather Brookes and Bild on journalism and the public interest", 27 September 2011.
Attributed, In the Media

“What I call the ‘information war’, where through the control of information our society is being radically transformed.”

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Attributed, Chatham House Talk (September 28, 2011)

“Transparency can help citizens hold the powerful to account; but it can also be used by the powerful to control citizens by making their lives transparent through surveillance. For transparency to be just, it must always be considered in relationship to power.”

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Attributed, In the Media

“In the public sphere, perception is reality: it's more important to be seen to do something than actually to do it. At least when private companies use PR and advertising they must spend their own money and there are other corporations vying for our business. If a company doesn't give us what we want they face bankruptcy. Public institutions, however, are monopolies. We have no choice but to buy, if not use, their services. If we don't like the way our particular police force operates it's not like we can choose another one or even withhold the money used to run the one we don't like. We're forced - under threat of imprisonment - to pay for a monopoly service and for it to tell us how great it is. This is the real danger of institutional PR. In the absence of competition it is only through a diversity of opinion and public scrutiny that some level of accountability can exist. PR stifles debate and suppresses opinion through the use of centralized press offices and communication protocols.”

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Heather Brooke

Pages 45-46.
The Silent State: Secrets, Surveillance and the Myth of British Democracy, 1st Edition

“The world may be more complex and uncertain than we would like, but giving away our freedom for the false promises of protection is not a sustainable solution. We are defined not just by what we preach, but by what we practice. We cannot claim to be an enlightened democratic society if we live in breach of these values, without the rule of law, without reason, or the rigorous commitment to truth.”

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Heather Brooke

Page 238.
The Revolution Will Be Digitised: Dispatches From the Information War, 1st Edition

“I’m talking of the revolutionary quality of digitization. And I say it’s revolutionary because once information is no longer a bunch of box files or papers in a filing cabinet but just bits that fly through the air, it means that it’s so hard for people in power to control it. And it’s always been true that knowledge is power. And so once it becomes very difficult for people in power to keep hold of information it means that it becomes very hard for them to keep hold of power, because power just flows out. The default now is zero cost for information to spread instantly around the globe. And in fact you have to pay money to stop it now. That’s incredibly disruptive and revolutionary.”

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Heather Brooke

International Journalism Festival http://www.journalismfestival.com/news/heather-brooke-antitrust-legislation-needed-to-keep-the-internet-free/ Interview with Fabio Chiusi, 12 April 2012.
Attributed, In the Media

“Maybe you would prefer not to be bothered with how the government is run. If that's the case then you have no right to complain when your taxes are raised, or if your children's education is substandard, or you have to wait a year for a vital operation. Good government does not happen by itself but is the result of individual effort. One of the easiest and most effective things you can do is simply to ask for information. I hope I've given you the tools and confidence to do exactly that.”

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Heather Brooke

Page 286.
Your Right to Know: A Citizen's Guide to the Freedom of Information Act, 2nd Edition

“The first thing is that you’re always at a disadvantage, because a bureaucracy is funded by the public to have permanent people there who can relentlessly advocate for their own interest. And that’s the problem: when bureaucracy stops working for the public interest.”

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Heather Brooke

International Journalism Festival http://www.journalismfestival.com/news/heather-brooke-antitrust-legislation-needed-to-keep-the-internet-free/ Interview with Fabio Chiusi, 12 April 2012.
Attributed, In the Media

“Journalists are, or ought to be, the public's hired guns sent out to collect information, question it, verify it and distil it to what is important and true. This takes time and skill, and is the only thing a journalist does that marks him or her out as a professional. It's also the reason why anyone would choose well-known newspaper's website over an unknown blog.”

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Heather Brooke

Press Gazette http://www.pressgazette.co.uk/wire/8235 - "Harold Evans, Guido Fawkes, Heather Brookes and Bild on journalism and the public interest", 27 September 2011.
Attributed, In the Media

“Transparency is seen as the antidote to corruption because secrecy is, if not its cause, then at least a necessary precondition. This is especially so for corruption involving private enrichment from public goods. Transparency is a power-reducing mechanism so it matters whose affairs are made transparent and for what purpose.”

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Heather Brooke

Attributed, In the Media
Source: Financial Times http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/7ba47200-015c-11e6-99cb-83242733f755.html#axzz45lPGQfQg "Transparency thwarts the abuse of power to enrich the powerful", Column in the Financial Times, 13 April 2016.

“We are at an extraordinary moment in human history: never before has the possibility of true democracy been so close to realisation. At the cost of publishing and duplication has dropped to near zero, a truly free press, and a truly informed public, becomes a reality. A new Information Enlightment is dawning where knowledge flows freely, beyond national boundaries. Technology is breaking down traditional social barriers of status, class, power, wealth and geography, replacing them with an ethos of collaboration and transparency. In this new Enlightenment it isn't just scientific truths that are the goal, but discovering truths about the way we live, about politics and power.”

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Heather Brooke

Page ix.
The Revolution Will Be Digitised: Dispatches From the Information War, 1st Edition

“Transparency strengthens democracy only when it gives citizens information they can use. It is not just about politicians telling us what they want us to know. For it to mean anything, it must empower citizens and provide answers to the questions they ask, not merely spoon feed them meagre information rations.”

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Attributed, In the Media

“We need to codify our values and build consensus around what we want from a free society and a free internet. We need to put into law protections for our privacy and our right to speak and assemble.”

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Heather Brooke

The Guardian http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2012/apr/20/we-should-all-be-hactivists "We should all be hacktivists now", Column in the Guardian, 20 April 2012.
Attributed, In the Media

“Leaks have happened before. They are not new. But the industrial scale of leaking made possible through the digitisation of information and the ability to communicate instantly across the globe - that is new. If it is to be revolutionary, however, we need a model for a new type of politics.”

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Heather Brooke

Page 226.
The Revolution Will Be Digitised: Dispatches From the Information War, 1st Edition

“In the same way that in freedom of information around the world, the onus is always… the balance is always on disclosure and the state has to argue why it keeps things secret. But the problem always is in enforcement and who enforces it. And it becomes particularly problematic in the intelligence agencies. Because there you've got this argument of national security and what is happening is that national security is becoming the new word of God, where you can't challenge it. You can't challenge the facts behind why we go to war or why have we put people in prison or why have we occupied a country. And that's where I do kind of think that we need to push the line further.”

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Attributed, Chatham House Talk (September 28, 2011)

“A lack of government oversight hasn't hindered the internet. Quite the opposite. A hands-off approach is largely responsible for its fantastic growth and success. The tremendous innovation and economic boon produced by the free internet should be proof enough that the dead hand of government isn't needed.”

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Heather Brooke

The Guardian http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2012/apr/20/we-should-all-be-hactivists "We should all be hacktivists now", Column in the Guardian, 20 April 2012.
Attributed, In the Media