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1. In 1995, Glaxo bought Burroughs Wellcome and became the presumptive leader in AIDS therapy.
2. The first time I set out to find George F. Kennan, in 1982, I had just turned 21, begun my final semester at Princeton University and noticed with astonishment that the senior thesis deadline had crept to within four months.
3. I doubt there’s any government in the world that guides itself primarily by strategy or conceptual documents or worldview. Anybody who has the reins of power has to look at practical limitations and tradeoffs — the fact that you can focus at most on one or two things at a time, that resources are limited.
4. At the height of Iraq’s clandestine nuclear weapons program, which nearly succeeded in building a bomb in 1991, Tuwaitha incorporated research reactors, uranium mining and enrichment facilities, chemical engineering plants and an explosives fabrication center to build the device that detonates a nuclear core.
5. For a decade, makers of AIDS medicines had rejected the idea of lowering prices in poor countries for fear of eroding profits in rich ones. The position required a balancing act, because the companies had to deflect attacks on the global reach of their patents, which granted exclusive marketing rights for antiretroviral drugs.
6. Ecuador has never stated flatly that it would give asylum to Edward Snowden.
7. U.S. intelligence services routinely use collection methods against foreigners that foreseeably — with certainty — ingest high volumes of U.S. communications as well.
8. Privacy is relational. It depends on the audience. You don’t want your employer to know you’re job hunting. You don’t spill all about your love life to your mom or your kids. You don’t tell trade secrets to your rivals.
9. I favor pocket-sized hard drives that travel between home and office, syncing with computers on both ends.
10. Nothing is absolute in security.
11. Daniel Ellsberg showed tremendous courage back in the ‘70s.
12. There is no reliable way to calculate from the number of recorded compliance issues how many Americans have had their communications improperly collected, stored or distributed by the NSA.
13. Enclosed by a sand berm four miles around and 160 feet high, the Baghdad Nuclear Research Facility entombs what remains of reactors bombed by Israel in 1981 and the United States in 1991. It has stored industrial and medical wastes, along with spent reactor fuel.
14. The Patriot Act unleashed the FBI to search your email, travel and credit records without even a suspicion of wrongdoing.
15. Activists and geeks, standing together, are demonstrating powers beyond the reach of government control.
16. I’ve always shied away from online data storage. I don’t even use my employers’ network drives for anything sensitive. I want to control access myself.
17. The modern era of continuity planning began under President Ronald Reagan.
18. Companies that receive government information demands have to obey the law, but they often have room for maneuver. They scarcely ever use it.
19. The U.S. government has known since the early 1990s about Soviet-era smallpox weapons, and collected circumstantial evidence of programs elsewhere.
20. First developed as a weapon by the U.S. Army, VX is an oily, odorless and tasteless liquid that kills on contact with the skin or when inhaled in aerosol form. Like other nerve agents, it is treatable in the first minutes after exposure but otherwise leads swiftly to fatal convulsions and respiratory failure.