Heather Brooke

"What I see now when I visit America is the juxtaposition of wild nature and sterile humanity. People boxing themselves away - in houses, cars, offices."

"They say everything is bigger in America but when you’re barreling along a 10-lane highway with massive trucks on either side of you and an aggressive SUV shoving your rear, it’s hard not to feel insignificant in a hostile universe. The only sensible solution seems to be to supersize yourself so you don’t get run over. It’s as if insignificance was the design brief for so much of American architecture and infrastructure. It ignores the reality of human size, let alone vulnerability, preferring an egoic delusion that humans are separate and superior to nature. But this feeling of insignificance leads to an insatiable hunger. For a bigger vehicle, a bigger house, more money, more guns - anything to feel more secure, and that security never materializes."

"A brutal work culture adds to the feeling, pushing people toward transience. Jobs have primary importance not just for a necessary salary but to get health insurance."

"I would feel homesick for Federal Way, Washington where I grew up. A city both exuberant with nature but also nature’s destruction: virgin forests giving way to freeways, streams filled in to build strip malls, dams destroying ancient salmon spawning grounds."

"To solve our current dependence on fossil fuels is a complex problem that demands communication and cooperation. Taking binary stands and publicly shaming people, doesn’t seem a good way to solve this problem."

"Two things signal to me when a group is more interested in self-righteousness than making actual policy: Picking on allies and name calling."

"This moral superiority reveals something important. This group isn’t dealing with reality, which is nuanced and interdependent, but with absolutes. And they aren’t interested in compromise or solutions, but moral purity. Their idea of moral purity. You can share the same overall goal - be that an end to fossil fuels, sexism, racism, capitalism, you name it - but these groups demand fealty to their language and their specific interpretation of the problem. They aren’t interested in any views other than their own. You know what that sounds like? Totalitarianism."

"I used to be suspicious of happiness. It’s not that I yearned to be unhappy, but too often the quest for happiness was, to my mind, tied up with delusional thinking. It involved putting on blinkers, so the darker, sadder, more disturbing aspects of reality were blanked out. I’ve always had a ravenous curiosity for truth. I want to understand life and get to its essence, so putting on blinkers was not for me."

"As a newspaper reporter, I covered crime, then politics then investigations. None could be described as abundant with happiness. Yet I didn’t feel unhappy reporting on these realities. They were truths that needed to be told. Truth needs to be told regardless of how it makes people feel, and more often than not it makes people feel bad before it makes them feel good. It’s crucial to get through that initial pain, because only by doing so, and seeing reality as it is, can we learn and change."

"One of the big breakthroughs came when I started gardening. Nature is always the best teacher. It IS the universe. It IS life/death/rebirth. Trees fall, plants die, but all the time they’re also being reborn. I can’t help but notice the universe has provided all the conditions for life not just to survive but to thrive."

"In elementary school, I loved Show and Tell. I loved to hunt around my house for an object I could bring to school with a story. It’s not hard to see why I was drawn to journalism - being a reporter is the grown-up version of Show and Tell. I also loved to show off and perform bike and roller-skating stunts. Yet somewhere along the way I lost the joy of being seen. Instead, starting in my teenage years, the desire came coupled with shame, dread, anxiety, embarrassment, even outright mortification. I don’t think I’m unusual in this, especially among women."

"The need to be seen is fundamental to all humans. In healthy development, a child gets appropriate amounts of attention and recognition, which leads to a secure sense of self worth. If we are also accepted in our fullness then we’ve hit the developmental jackpot and become superbly well-adjusted adults. But many of us didn’t get that level of attention, attunement or acceptance. In my own case, I was left with a hunger and yearning to be known and valued."

"Suddenly other people thought me admirable and important. When they did, I felt good. But also nervous because what if they suddenly changed their mind? I could see other famous people fall from the public’s favour, admiration turning to envy or hatred. People wrote admiring letters to me, but I couldn’t take it in because I thought ‘they don’t really know me’. They only knew the version of me I put on display - that of the tough tenacious reporter, battling for the people’s right to know. They didn’t know my aching emptiness, my deep hunger to be known. I learned that being seen is not the same as being known. Outsourcing my self-worth to total strangers, I realised, was not a good idea."

"What to do? In therapy there’s a saying that ‘the way through is in’. Instead of avoiding pain, go through it. My investigative mindset liked this and so I decided to investigate myself. I started therapy and also began writing more creatively. It’s how I wrote as a child until shame cloaked my ability to be seen."

"Why do women go around feeling so embarrassed of ourselves? Why do we wind up feeling we have to be perfect, or pure, pretty or agreeable just to gain a modicum of acceptance? I think it’s because that’s actually the fact of being a woman in a patriarchal society."

"So shame can help protect us, but it can also become a prison. It precludes change. As long as we remain invisible, as long as we dim our light, or hide behind a persona, we curtail our ability to be truly known by others and form meaningful connections."

"Flying from Gatwick Airport recently, I noticed the absolute dearth of water fountains. I found just one in the terminal and it was hiding in a bathroom. If there are more, they’re not easily located. It’s only slightly better at Heathrow unless you happen to be a member of a private lounge (which since British Airways changed their loyalty program I no longer am). The single best way to avoid plastic pollution is for people to use their own water bottles and plenty of people had them. There were many of us hunting around the airport for a place to fill them. Why the lack? We live in a wet country where water is plentiful. When I go to America there are (and have been for decades) fountains everywhere. Yet most British airports have a distinct lack of water fountains."

"On tropical beaches from Ghana to the Caribbean and Indonesia, the most common detritus I’ve seen is the plastic water bottle. We in the West really have no excuse to continue to buy water in plastic bottles when it is a readily available resource. It’s how we know most eco-preservation chat is rhetoric rather than reality. What matters most is money not nature. Pure greed. We all fall prey to this - preferring to pay over the odds to each buy our own bottle of water from a private company rather than agreeing to collectively pay for a water fountain."

"I was being seen, yes, but fame is outsourcing your own worth onto strangers. It doesn’t solve the root problem of feeling unworthy or unloved. Nor does it do anything to heal the pain from such a feeling. Fame, money, power - they promise, or give the illusion of, being the solution to life’s pains, but in reality they are hollow. At best, they offer short-term, superficial relief from pain, but at worst they isolate a person so thoroughly they became incapable of happiness or living a meaningful life."

"Look at anyone who uses money, fame or power to fill their inner voids, and you’ll see someone in a clear addiction cycle. They can’t live without their next fix. The next headline, the next million, the next power grab."

"First, what makes a bad airport: Too few seats and a dearth of facilities apart from the inevitable duty free that you always find, no matter how dire the airport, snaking for miles, standing between airport security and your departure gates like an obstacle course that reeks of perfume. I hate these modern duty free shops that have come to infest all modern airports. Why is that? Are they all run by the same company and has that company got a monopoly on all the world’s airports? Or our airport managers so lacking in imagination they can’t imagine an airport without this mecca to materialism? If an alien came down to earth what would they make of the human race with our seeming obsession with alcohol, cigarettes, chocolate from the same multinational companies, cosmetics and perfume? The only good thing in them is the one shelf spotlighting local delicacies, but these are always massively overpriced and you can get much better quality and variety in the town itself."

"Writing - at least for me - requires quiet, stability, stillness. Some might say boredom. How to write about life when you’re too busy living it? Life fills my cup and then I need time and space to distill what’s in the cup into its essence. The challenge is to live a full, adventurous life while also finding time and space to write about it. If there’s no time or space to reflect, then what I write is just hot takes and first impressions. That’s the sort of writing I did as a reporter, but here I want to make broader sense of what I’ve experienced. Boil all those experiences of being alive into some kind of meaning."

"When death is not witnessed in its physical reality, it lives only in our imagination. I think this is one reason we fear death so much more in the West than in cultures where dead bodies are an everyday part of life. When we can see the physical dimension of death, its mystery is lessened. We can see that in death there is also a lot of peace. When death exists only in our imagination or in crime drama re-creations, it is limitless and frightening."

"It is scrutiny by the general public that keeps the powerful honest."

"By making everything secure [governments] have degraded the quality of secrecy."

"Journalists are, or ought to be, the public's hired guns sent out to collect information, question it, verify it and distil it to what is important and true. This takes time and skill, and is the only thing a journalist does that marks him or her out as a professional. It's also the reason why anyone would choose well-known newspaper's website over an unknown blog."

"The survival of journalism in the digital age rests on its unique selling point: serving this public interest. Fail or forget to do that, and it has no future."

"If you believe the promise that an authoritarian state makes that if it has enough knowledge on every citizen it will keep people safe. I think that’s a false promise. It doesn’t actually happen. If that was the case then East Germany would be a really incredible place to live and in fact it wasn’t, it was really horrible, most of these places were really horrible."

"I’m talking of the revolutionary quality of digitization. And I say it’s revolutionary because once information is no longer a bunch of box files or papers in a filing cabinet but just bits that fly through the air, it means that it’s so hard for people in power to control it. And it’s always been true that knowledge is power. And so once it becomes very difficult for people in power to keep hold of information it means that it becomes very hard for them to keep hold of power, because power just flows out. The default now is zero cost for information to spread instantly around the globe. And in fact you have to pay money to stop it now. That’s incredibly disruptive and revolutionary."

"The first thing is that you’re always at a disadvantage, because a bureaucracy is funded by the public to have permanent people there who can relentlessly advocate for their own interest. And that’s the problem: when bureaucracy stops working for the public interest."

"What’s really important is to have systemic changes. By that I mean, for example, putting into law that people have a right to access official information. Once freedom of information becomes part of the bureaucracy, the bureaucrats who are freedom of information officials have a vested interest in making sure that that law is there and that it actually works, because it kind of justifies their existence. One thing is to institutionalize rights to know."

"There doesn’t seem to be any law that’s there to protect the citizens from massive State surveillance. We have to collectively come up with some fundamental values around people’s right to privacy, the right to be left alone from government, and rights to free speech."

"We’ve come up with ways to judge the quality of a product. The thing is that we’re just getting used to the idea that information is a product, and we have to come up with criteria on which to judge which information is worth paying attention to and taking seriously and which isn’t. So we have to think: is this information new? Is it relevant? Is it trustworthy? Can I verify it? Who’s the source? If you’re a journalist you’re used to doing this as your job, but that’s going to become increasingly necessary for people online, because they just get hit with so much information, and if they don’t want to just sit there, manipulated by all different kinds of propaganda, they have to start getting tooled up on how to be a savvy information consumer."

"The problem with WikiLeaks is that it’s been taken over by Julian Assange, and that is directly opposed to what the whole movement is meant to be about: decentralized power, collaboration, equality and transparency. Under Julian Assange, WikiLeaks has become exactly the opposite of all of these things: it’s become totally centralized, it’s become a hierarchy, it’s not transparent. And it’s not collaborative, but incredibly divisive in the transparency community, because anybody who dares to challenge or criticize Julian comes under severe fire from him. A person who’s meant to be a leader of a movement, which is what he claims to be, you’re meant to be about building and accruing allies, rather than going into the movement and being divisive. But that’s exactly what he’s been."

"The movement of radical transparency and accountability is not about putting a new person in charge, it’s about getting rid of the whole idea of hierarchal politics. It’s about decentralizing power."

"A lack of government oversight hasn't hindered the internet. Quite the opposite. A hands-off approach is largely responsible for its fantastic growth and success. The tremendous innovation and economic boon produced by the free internet should be proof enough that the dead hand of government isn't needed."

"This is the information war we are now engaged in. Governments are seeking to militarise cyberspace while citizens fight for the right to communicate and assemble freely online without state surveillance."

"We need to codify our values and build consensus around what we want from a free society and a free internet. We need to put into law protections for our privacy and our right to speak and assemble."

"To be successful, a campaign to maintain the free internet and freedom of information has to go beyond vandal hackers. Stunts designed not to provoke dialogue or persuade the public of the rightness of the cause but simply to throw up a middle finger to authority are more hindrance than help."

"The public pay for and elect the government and it is only by the people’s will that those in public office hold power. Public servants’ primary responsibility is to serve the people and we have a right to know what they are doing in our name and with our money. Public accountability does not end the day after an election."

"Transparency is seen as the antidote to corruption because secrecy is, if not its cause, then at least a necessary precondition. This is especially so for corruption involving private enrichment from public goods. Transparency is a power-reducing mechanism so it matters whose affairs are made transparent and for what purpose."

"Transparency can help citizens hold the powerful to account; but it can also be used by the powerful to control citizens by making their lives transparent through surveillance. For transparency to be just, it must always be considered in relationship to power."

"Transparency helps ensure that power is not abused or used to make the powerful, or their immediate families, rich. There is also a genuine public interest in ensuring that the people who make laws and levy tax are following those laws and paying their fair share of tax."

"This is the problem with the argument that if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear: it ignores the issue of power. If we are not careful, transparency can be used to increase, rather than reduce, the information asymmetry between ruler and ruled."

"Transparency strengthens democracy only when it gives citizens information they can use. It is not just about politicians telling us what they want us to know. For it to mean anything, it must empower citizens and provide answers to the questions they ask, not merely spoon feed them meagre information rations."

"I get it. It is always easier to go after the person raising a problem than to deal with the problem itself, especially if that problem is systemic."

"One of the things that struck me most noticeably when moving to the UK from the US in 1997 was the secrecy of the state toward its citizens. Having worked as a crime reporter in America, I discovered that most of the public records and information I used to do my job were actually illegal to access in the UK. I found the secrecy wasn’t unique to law enforcement but rather a default attitude among officials. It didn’t matter if I were asking for details of food hygiene inspections, parliamentary expenses or police reports, the attitude was the same. A kind of disbelief and then a patronising disdain, by which I was meant to understand that it was not my “place” as a mere citizen — or subject as I learnt was the UK term — to ask for a full accounting from agents of the state."

"I was putting together a book, Your Right to Know, about people’s new rights under the Freedom of Information Act (FOI) 2000 that was coming into force in 2005. I thought it would be a game-changer for British democracy and I wanted to include contact details for the new FOI units in public agencies. I was used to naming public officials. In America it was no big deal; anonymity was only used if there was a valid reason. But you would have thought I’d asked for nuclear codes such was the shock and pushback I received to this simple request. The idea of providing actual names was anathema and I began to wonder who was the master here, and who the servant."

"Secrecy, in the hands of the powerful, is too easy a tool to abuse. The distance from protection to cover-up is short, and a tool initially intended to help can quickly morph into causing harm. That’s why it should never be a default for anyone in power, but rather an exception."

"What I call the ‘information war’, where through the control of information our society is being radically transformed."