Stringent “background checks” are central to many proposals for curbing gun violence. The following is a background check on the nation’s largest buyer of firearms:

The applicant, U.S. Pentagon, seeks to purchase a wide variety of firearms in vast quantities. This background check has determined that the applicant has a long history of assisting individuals, organizations and governments prone to gun violence.

It has been just over two years since Americans were really introduced to WikiLeaks. The high-profile releases of US State Embassy cables, war logs from Iraq and Afghanistan, and the “Collateral Murder” video turned the organization and its founder Julian Assange into a beat, which journalists or reporters were closely following. One journalist, who has closely tracked the organization and its founder, is Andy Greenberg of Forbes.

His book, This Machine Kills Secrets: How WikiLeakers, Cypherpunks and Hacktivists Aim to Free the World’s Information, covers what he describes as “a revolutionary protest movement bent not on stealing information but on building a tool that inexorably coaxes it out, a technology that slips inside of institutions and levels their defense against the free flow of data like a Trojan horse of cryptographic software and silicon.”