In effect, you cannot stop Iraq from growing nasty bugs in the basement. You can stop them from putting operational warheads on working missiles and launching them at their neighbors.

The government of Sudan, employing a back channel direct from its president to the Central Intelligence Agency, offered in the early spring of 1996 to arrest Osama bin Laden and place him in Saudi custody, according to officials and former officials in all three countries.

The $52.6 billion U.S. intelligence arsenal is aimed mainly at unambiguous adversaries, including al-Qaida, North Korea and Iran. But top-secret budget documents reveal an equally intense focus on one purported ally: Pakistan.

U.S. intelligence services routinely use collection methods against foreigners that foreseeably - with certainty - ingest high volumes of U.S. communications as well.

If Al Gore invented the Internet, I invented spell check.

When a country doesn't have a good economic infrastructure, that harms the country. With Stripe, the idea is that by providing better infrastructure, by linking the Internet economically, by making it easier for these online businesses to exist, it'll make the web better.

I must be the last person online to have been struck with this realization, but it's amazing how the Internet has empowered hundreds of ordinary people, turning them into little Diane Sawyers and Anderson Coopers as they snap and blog away.

I want to find the intersection between digital media and traditional media and be pioneering the endeavor to merge the two worlds.