Distrust & caution are the parents of security.

was first assigned security protection during the primaries, when I was a governor viewed as a long shot for the nomination.

I was so terrified, because it had never occurred to me how many dangers there were online until we took that course. I didn’t know then that a few years on, I’d be appointed as minister in charge of setting up Ghana’s cybersecurity infrastructure because we didn’t have anything on the ground.

One trusted machines. But one never expected machines to return the favor.

When I assumed office,this was a challenge to the management, in addition to low morale among security personnel necessitated by high level of indiscipline in the Security Unit, inadequate security operatives, unavailability of functional vehicles, porous and unmanned entry points and wide spread availability of arms amongst students which they deployed at will.

Even "security", that word so fretful to science and to the free exchange of ideas, is no modern innovation. Witness Bacon's elaborate encrypting of his work, Newton's allegedly purposeful distortion of a formula, Da Vinci who kept his long undeciphered notebooks in mirror-writing, and other examples that might be cited where the aim was apparently to prevent harm from ensuing as a result of the unexpert use of knowledge or wrong intent. The Sorcerer's Apprentice, that favorite fable of the laboratory assistant who learns the spell to make the mop carry water but who does not know how to stop the operation once it has begun, suggests the cataclysmic consequence where the sorcerer had not been sufficiently "security-minded" with, his formula. That might be a very, old piece of science-writing.

She recalled scoffing at Morris’s three golden rules of computer security: do not own a computer;
do not power it on;
and do not use one The subtlety of it had escaped her at the time. It wasn’t meant as a surrender. It was a meditation on risk versus benefit. Did these systems give us more than they took from us? It was an admission that we will never be fully secure. We must instead strive for survivability.

While serving as a minister, I didn’t like security officers but was coerced to have one. Still, my officers were usually plain-clothed because I didn’t want to scare people.

I’ve had clients who thought they needed an absurd level of security. (And I’m talking absurd even by my standards, and my code was developed by a bond company known for intense xenophobic paranoia, tempered only by desperate greed.) I’ve also had clients who thought they didn’t need any security at all, right up until something ate them.

Democracy and security do not fall from heaven — they come with a cost.

Any time you had a cipher, you were vulnerable to someone smarter than you coming up with a way of breaking it.

If you knew how much work went into it, you wouldn't call it genius.

The role had been spawned by the widespread belief that traders didn’t know how to talk to computer geeks and that computer geeks did not respond rationally to big, hairy traders hollering at them.

If you knew how much work went into it, you would not call it genius.