Little Brother Technology and Modernization Quotes

And the best part ­­ as far as I was concerned ­­ was that ParanoidXbox was paranoid. Every bit that went over the air was scrambled to within an inch of its life. You could wiretap it all you wanted, but you'd never figure out who was talking, what they were talking about, or who they were talking to. Anonymous web, email and IM. Just what I needed. (5.139-140)

You can learn to write simple code in an afternoon. Start with a language like Python, which was written to give non­programmers an easier way to make the machine dance to their tune. Even if you only write code for one day, one afternoon, you have to do it. Computers can control you or they can lighten your work ­­ if you want to be in charge of your machines, you have to learn to write code.

We wrote a lot of code that night. (7.142-3)

In public-key crypto, each user gets two keys. They're long strings of mathematical gibberish, and they have an almost magic property. Whatever you scramble with one key, the other will unlock, and vice versa. What's more, they're the only keys that can do this — if you can unscramble a message with one key, you know it was scrambled with the other (and vice versa).
So you take either one of these keys (it doesn't matter which one) and you just publish it. You make it a total non­secret. You want anyone in the world to know what it is. For obvious reasons, they call this your "public key."

The other key, you hide in the darkest reaches of your mind. You protect it with your life. You never let anyone ever know what it is. That's called your "private key." (Duh.) (10.7-10)