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All Quotes by author - Toomas Hendrik Ilves

" Because of cyberattacks and fake news, we can already imagine the problem all democratic societies will face in future elections: how to limit lies when they threaten democracy? "

" Big data knows and can deduce more about you than Big Brother ever could. "

" Brits, Scandinavians, Finns, Estonians consider themselves rational, logical, unencumbered by emotional arguments; we are businesslike, stubborn, and hard-working. "

" Can the wider West establish a global 'cyber NATO?' It would be difficult, but so, too, was the founding of NATO itself, which was called into being only after successive communist coups in Eastern Europe. "

" Cybersecurity needs to be taken seriously by everyone. "

" Democracies stand on several key pillars: Free and fair elections, human rights, the rule of law, and a free untrammeled media. Until 2016, an open media was seen as a resilient democratic pillar that supported the others. "

" Democracy is messy, clearly, but it has one key factor, which is an orderly transfer of power. "

" Digital warfare, in the Clausewitz definition as 'the continuation of policy by other means,' reached Western public consciousness via my own country, Estonia, in 2007 when our governmental, banking, and news media servers were hit with 'distributed denial-of-service attacks,' which is when hackers overload servers until they shut down. "

" Diplomacy between a powerful, victorious army and a side that's losing doesn't really work well. "

" Everything can be known and, in some cases, everything is known. "

" Fake news is cheap to produce. Genuine journalism is expensive. "

" Generally, people's fear and hesitancy regarding greater computerization comes from a George Orwell/'1984'-based metaphor of a single computer or data base where all your information is stored, knows everything about you, and can use this information at will and for evil purposes. "

" George Bush and I share a love of steel brush cutters. It turns out we use the same professional brush cutter. He asked me what I did. I said I cut brush. He says, 'Oh, what do you use?' I said steel. He goes, 'Oh, me too.' "

" If getting young people computer-literate through putting school systems online is a no-brainer, at least in retrospect, getting older people and those in rural areas online can be a tougher nut to crack. "

" I knew who Bruce Springsteen was before he had his first record. "

" I'm an American by accent, and I grew up in the States, living there between the age of three and 24. "

" I'm not afraid of code. I mean, I understand how these things work. I thought that that was the one area where Estonia was playing on a level playing field. "

" In a modern digitalized world, it is possible to paralyze a country without attacking its defense forces: The country can be ruined by simply bringing its SCADA systems to a halt. To impoverish a country, one can erase its banking records. The most sophisticated military technology can be rendered irrelevant. In cyberspace, no country is an island. "

" In both Russia and the U.S., there are a very small number of very, very rich people, and then there are a lot of people who don't have anything. The less inequality you have in a society, the more social peace you have. It's kind of a no-brainer. "

" In cyberwarfare, it is much harder to identify the attacker and, therefore, to know how to retaliate. "

" In Germany, a country that for obvious reasons is far more attuned than most to the dangers of demagogy, populism, and nationalism, lawmakers have already proposed taking legal measures against fake news. When populist, nationalist fake news threatens the liberal democratic center, other Europeans may follow suit. "

" In Russia, tweeting or sharing real news that's embarrassing to the regime can land you in prison. Imagine, then, the response of the regime to 'fake news' that's damaging to the Kremlin. "

" I realised that if we were not in the E.U., there were people in the E.U. who were also members of NATO that would veto our joining NATO. "

" I remember starting to read about the Soviet Union when I was eight years old; I think I was reading my father's 'New York Times.' "

" It is hard to work with the nagging doubt that perhaps some foreign intelligence agency is reading all your correspondence, especially when you know they have done so in the past. "

" It's much cheaper to influence elections than it is to go to war. "

" I've been in and out of academia ever since I was young. "

" I was surprised by some of my French colleagues who immediately assumed that because I spoke English with an American accent, that, therefore, you must be a supporter of whoever is the current president of the United States. There seems to be this widespread feeling that, 'Oh, American accent - therefore, you like cowboy boots.' "

" I was the child of refugees. "

" Liberal democracies do not and often cannot respond in kind to cyberattacks on their own way of governance. "

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