Archive: Year: 2014

Dirty Socks If you read just one thing about Emma and Bill Keller's double-set of columns on Lisa Adams (the former of which was taken down by The Guardian for investigation) and her fight with cancer, let it be this essay by Zeynep Tufekci. Sadly, Bill Keller thinks the negative reaction to both pieces was fueled "by a tide of political correctness." My two cents: There's something that connects Keller's apparent disdain for Adams' self-disclosure and his noted distaste for Julian Assange's dirty socks. Unfortunately for him, the world will never be as orderly as he thought it once was. If you haven't yet read Anthony Townsend's new book The Smart City, check out this interview with him in The Atlantic. Now that...

Collections President Obama will give a speech this Friday announcing reforms to the National Security Agency. These stories in the Washington Post and The Guardian detail Obama's deliberations about what he may announce, focusing on whether he will continue the NSA's mass surveillance programs. The mass collection of phone records would have had "no discernible impact on preventing acts of terrorism" in 225 cases in the US since 9-11, according to a new report by the New America Foundation. In advance of "The Day We Fight Back," Demand Progress has released a short video honoring Aaron Swartz that features excerpts from the forthcoming documentary "The Internet's Own Boy." Several clips show Swartz presciently addressing the NSA's surveillance programs. Senator John McCain said Sunday that Congress...

Done In By Data Trevor Timm of the Freedom of the Press Foundation skewers the chair and co-chair of the House Intelligence Committee for putting out a "fact-free" press release yesterday claiming that Edward Snowden's leaks "are likely to have lethal consequences for our troops." Says Timm, "We’ve seen this same scene over and over again in the past decade, and the results are always the same: the government serially exaggerates damage to national security in an attempt to make sure newsworthy stories are not published or to vilify whistleblowers." National Journal's Dustin Volz reports on a meeting President Obama had yesterday with lawmakers to discuss possible legislative reforms of the NSA. The first American phone company to issue a transparency report describing...

Broken Heroes The Chris Christie #Bridgegate controversy has its own Twitter meme: #ChristieSpringsteenLyrics. Examples: "Traffic in NJ heavy due to highways jammed with heroes on last chance power drives." @EnriqueOther "The highway's jammed with broken heroes and orange cones. There goes my last chance power drive." @MrMediaTraining "Hey Little Girl is Your Daddy Home Is He Stuck in Traffic Leaving you All Alone." @coryharris Mother Jones's David Corn wins the thread with "For his presser, does Christie have a Brilliant Disguise. Or will he be Dancing in the Dark and headed for a Downbound Train?" Cory Doctorow fears "We are Huxleying ourselves into the full Orwell," and that "2014 is the year we lose the Web" due to the W3C's successful push for digital rights management...

Who Watches? The New York Times editorial page takes the Obama administration to task, again, for its failure to be more transparent--this time for withholding a secret Justice Department memo that gave the FBI legal authority to collect Americans' telephone and financial records without a subpoena or court order. Want to see how your email metadata--just the time and date stamps and the "to" and "cc" fields--can be used to map your life? Read this post by the ACLU's Kade Crockford and then check out Immersion. Bonnie Raines, one of the eight anti-war activists who broke into an FBI office in Pennsylvania in 1971 in order to find hard evidence of the agency's illegal domestic surveillance activities, writes an op-ed for the Guardian...

"Somebody Had to Do It" Betty Medsger's new book, The Burglary, is the fuel for Mark Mazzetti's powerful front-page story in The New York Times on a group of anti-war activists who broke into an FBI office in Pennsylvania and broke open the scandal of the agency's spying on American citizens, including the first reference to COINTELPRO, a massive secret program of infiltration and disruption of domestic political organizations. In Mazzetti's hands, the activists' self-named "Citizens Commission to Investigate the FBI" offers a distant but clear echo on today's debate about Edward Snowden's act of defiance. In an interview with NBC News, one of the activist-burglars, John Raines, an 80-year-old retired Temple University religion professor, said, "“We did it … because somebody...

The Big Chill Fred Kaplan, Slate's long-time defense correspondent, has a smart and tough piece arguing the reasons "Why Snowden Won't (And Shouldn't) Get Clemency." His bottom line: Snowden didn't just reveal the NSA's domestic surveillance or spying on allies, but also also exposed the agency's programs in places like Pakistan, Iran and China. Senators Rand Paul (R-KY) and Chuck Schumer (D-NY) disagreed on the Snowden clemency question on ABC's This Week yesterday. Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) sent the NSA a letter asking if the agency has spied or is currently spying on members of Congress or other elected officials, and the agency's response, so far, is a non-denial, reports the Washington Post's Brian Fung. Lawrence Wright explores whether the NSA's massive collection of...

Inclemency The New York Times editorial calling for clemency for Edward Snowden continues to make waves, with Buzzfeed reporting on the news that several Members of Congress have said they are open to its conclusion, Firedoglake blogger Kevin Gosztola asking why the paper hasn't applied the same whistleblower label to Chelsea Manning, and former NSA director Michael Hayden telling the Daily Beast that clemency for Snowden would be "outrageous." Matthew Keys rounds up responses from Microsoft, Apple, Cisco, Dell, Hewlett-Packard and other tech companies whose services and products were reportedly (per Der Spiegel) compromised by the NSA. Glenn Greenwald thinks most tech companies were hypocritical, telling Salon's Natasha Lennard that they were "completely content to cooperate with the NSA, far beyond what the...

Accomplishments Happy New Year! If you were, like me, mostly offline for the holiday break, here's a list of must-read links to catch up on: Barton Gellman of the Washington Post, one of the first reporters contacted by Edward Snowden, traveled to Moscow to profile his subject. Snowden told him he believed his "mission's already accomplished" because he "wanted to give society a chance to determine if it should change itself" in response to the NSA's mass surveillance programs. Gellman writes that "Snowden succeeded beyond plausible ambition" with his leaks. Read the whole thing. Ruth Marcus, a Washington Post columnist, finds Snowden's statements to Gellman to be "insufferable" and a host of similar adjectives. Worth reading to get a taste of how DC...