Most other documents leaked to WikiLeaks do not carry the same explosive potential as candid cables written by American diplomats.

As leakers take great risks in releasing information, assuring them that they are not sacrificing themselves in vain and that their leaks would have public consequences would most likely encourage more people to leak.

If WikiLeaks were a for-profit company, determining its real value would be a nearly impossible task.

You actually see liberals checking 'Fox News,' if only to know what the conservatives are thinking. And you're seeing conservatives who venture into liberal sources, just to know what 'The New York Times' is thinking.

It's true that virtually all new technologies do trigger what sociologists would call 'moral panics,' that there are a lot of people who are concerned with the possible political and social consequences, and that this has been true throughout the ages.

There is this huge Roma problem in Europe. There are a lot of Romas who are discriminated against in countries like the Czech Republic or Hungary. They are an ethnic minority that in Europe everyone loves to hate.

Universities ought to be aware of the degree they would want to accept funding from governments like China to work on, say, face recognition technology.

I used to work for an NGO called Transitions Online, and I was their Director of New Media. I was a very idealistic fellow who thought that he could use blogs, social networks and new media to help promote democracy, human rights and freedom of expression.

I want my government to do something about my privacy - I don't want to just do it on my own.

There is something almost sacred about the Internet. I'm trying to secularize it.

There are good reasons why we don't want everyone to learn nuclear physics, medicine or how financial markets work. Our entire modern project has been about delegating power over us to skilled people who want to do the work and be rewarded accordingly.

The newspaper offers something very different from Google's aggregators. It offers a value system, an idea of what matters in the world. Newspapers need to start articulating that value.

Once Google is selected to run the infrastructure on which we are changing the world, Google will be there for ever. Democratic accountability will not be prevalent. You cannot file a public information request about Google.

It is easy to be seen as either a genius or a crank. If you have a Ph.D., at least you somewhat lower the chances that you will be seen as a crank.

This is the real tragedy of America's 'Internet freedom agenda': It's going to be the dissidents in China and Iran who will pay for the hypocrisy that drove it from the very beginning.

I want to prevent us reifying 'the Internet' as something to be preserved like some people want to preserve the American Constitution as it was written.

If you want to plan a revolution, you never do it in public - the authorities show up and arrest everyone.

The Internet has made it much more effective and cheaper to spread propaganda.

This marketization of personal information is a big mistake.

For much of its existence, design was all about convenience. We wanted to hide technology so that users are not distracted into thinking about the tools they use.

I think governments will increasingly be tempted to rely on Silicon Valley to solve problems like obesity or climate change because Silicon Valley runs the information infrastructure through which we consume information.

Look at something like cooking. Now, you would hear a lot about smart kitchens and augmented kitchens. And what do those smart kitchens actually do? They police what's happening inside the kitchen. They have cameras that distinguish ingredients one from each other and that tell you that shouldn't mix this ingredient with another ingredient.

We can now with Google Glasses record everything around us, and we can make sure that nothing is ever forgotten because everything is stored somewhere in Google servers or somewhere else.

We've never thought too deeply about the roles things like forgetting or partisanship or inefficiency or ambiguity or hypocrisy play in our political or social life. It's been impossible to get rid of them, so we took them for granted, and we kind of thought, naively, that they're always the enemy.